Can’t Get It All (or any of it) Done

A favourite joke about stay-at-home moms is the one about the dad who comes home after a long day of work, finds the kids outside covered in mud, still in their pyjamas, walks into the house which is a total disaster: food, clothes, dirt, toys everywhere … with increasing dread, he searches the house and finally finds his wife in an upstairs bedroom, surrounded by more mess. ‘Honey, what on earth happened here?’

‘You know that nothing I do all day? Today I didn’t do it.’

Life is like that with little kids.

It really does feel like it’s not possible to get it all done, and on a lot of days it doesn’t feel like it’s at all possible to get any of it done.
There are many ways to ‘get it all’ done, and more prolific writers than I have spent a lot of their time describing how… see Flylady, The I Hate to Housekeep Book, Sidetracked Home Executives, Superwoman, and Who Says It’s a Woman’s Job to Clean? for more …

But these are the small children at home, totally overwhelmed can’t get anything done suggestions I have:

Hire help

From a professional organizer and a cleaning lady (I wish) to the 12-year-old down the street, paid assistance is available in the oddest corners of the world, and don’t necessarily cost the kind of major-luxury money people might think. A 12-year-old mother’s helper will tidy the toys, fold the laundry, wash the dishes, sweep and vacuum for less than it costs to hire a babysitter to take the children away for a while so mom can do all that. I loved my mother’s helper –still do, although she’s already past the stage in her life now where she hired my children for the same work…

Ask for help

Strangely, this one comes with more barriers than hiring help. Hiring only requires money. Asking requires super-human courage… apparently. Here are a couple of ways of getting help:

Be kind and helpful to your friends and family by letting them feel good about making a meaningful contribution to your life. Too many people are stingy with their friends and family, stopping them from getting the warm, fuzzy feelings of being genuinely helpful to the people they love. 

Be nice: let them help. In fact, make a list with the stuff that’s driving you nuts at the top and ask them to do anything off the list that they want to, the higher up the list the better…

Start a co-op with friends in the same position, spending three or four days a week (depends on how many friends you have) at each house in turn. The host gets to pick what’s driving her (or him) nuts this week and everyone works on that, plus dinner with enough for all to take away, so everyone can head home without more to do when they get there. 

Shared projects, from making Christmas presents to sorting all the kids’ clothes, baking or decluttering the whole house, canning, or doing everyone’s taxes, can make the work easier and keep the children content longer than at home. Even just one friend, one day a week, will help you (and your friend) with day-to-day life.

Simplify the List

Cut things off the list, and do most of it far less frequently.

Dusting is, in my view, a complete waste of time, not the least because it takes the same amount of time to do it daily as it does weekly or even monthly –so why spend thirty-one times as long doing the job than you have to? 

Let the silver go black for a few years, no one will die or need therapy. Concentrate on hygiene, not optics: if it isn’t used as a food preparation surface, it probably doesn’t need to be sterile. Pick your battles with your housework, too.

Declutter and remove duplicates. If you only have one pair of scissors and it has one place to belong you’ll never have to search for one of the twelve pairs. It will also be easier to keep them out of the hands of the little weirdos who are inclined to do home hairstyling on themselves and their siblings.

Simplicity Parenting suggests having only as many toys as can be easily cleaned up within five minutes. No one needs 13 pairs of jeans… but if you keep all of them because you have to have them, you’ll have a lot more laundry to do than I do. When kids only have three pairs of pants, you will never be faced with a pile of 31 that need washing at once. Or drying. Or folding. Or putting away… Consider how you would live on a 40’ sailboat, and re-think exactly how much of the stuff in your house you actually need to get through a week.

Make a list of what’s bugging you and do just one thing every day. If the windows are making you crazy, wash one on Monday and one on Tuesday and one on Thursday… until they’re all done. Eventually, you’ll have everything done, with much of it not needing to be re-done for months.

Pick out the valuables from the piles and put everything else into boxes or trash bags and call the local removal company to take the rest away. 

Few people whose homes have burned down ever regret not rescuing the 11th unread magazine or all of the black shoes from the blaze. There will forever be more stuff coming into your home: make some room for the people to live in ease and comfort instead of snowed under even before one more item crosses the threshold. For $60, you could live in the delight of never having to put that away ever again.

What You Look At You See

 

 

A topic arose on a facebook group, which was more or less this:

Anyway, newest bit of helpful advice from his wife! "We never had car seats and we survived, it's all just money making"..........:|, I had to walk away.

My response was:

Hands up all the kids who didn't have car seats who died....
... uh ... anyone?
It's called 'attention bias' --noticing only what you already believe is true. It's extremely popular.

In the case of the ‘we didn’t use car seats and we all survived’ the first piece of the problem is exactly as I retorted: hands up all of us who didn’t survive childhood.

A basic problem with the argument is that it only asks for people who could not have died as a result of lacking vehicle safety to confirm that they have not died of that cause. That’s a very convenient demographic to prove that point with… Convenient, but not compelling …

Attention bias causes all kinds of mistakes in thinking and decision-making.

It makes things feel like a big trend (say ‘there is more cancer now than ever before’) when the real change is more likely to be our age and our increased exposure to the demographic that has always had higher cancer rates . . . because in reality cancer rates are dropping steadily.

Attention bias can make us believe that since it hasn’t happened to us, it can’t happen to us (also known as the Gambler’s Fallacy: three coin tosses that come up heads means the next coin toss has a more than 1 in 2 chance of coming up tails, as if the former tosses have any impact on the physics of the next one.)

Not having been killed in a car accident yesterday does not decrease your chances of being killed in one tomorrow… it increases your odds. Because if you’d died yesterday, your odds of dying today would be nil.

Attention Bias is also something our minds can be primed to experience immediately, by having something specific pointed out:

Look around your room –do you see any particular colour pop out at you?

Now, look around your room for things that are blue.

Simply scanning for something in particular makes it stand out against what was, a moment ago, all background. It’s a natural attribute of our minds, which we get far better at as we age.

The first time I noticed the effect of Attention Bias was when I got my braces. I’d never taken notice of people’s teeth before, and suddenly it was the first thing I saw.

In real terms, we don’t do statistically analysis very well in our heads. We think things that have happened are very likely to happen again, and things that we have no contact with feel very unlikely to happen.

Some of this comes out in poor advice to teens (like ‘don’t go into professional music, hardly anyone becomes a rock star’ –when it’s really a thriving multi-billion dollar international industry, not just a handful of we-don’t-know-any superstars) and some of it comes out as curmudgeonly nonsense of the ‘we survived it so it’s not dangerous’ kind, as noted above.

You Don’t Have to Believe Everything You Think

Some people find it easier than others, learning to think about their own Attention Bias, and others find it tremendously difficult.

It can help to evaluate the ‘always, never’ statements first … which the first quote really is. The premise is ‘no child ever died in a car accident without a car seat’ . . .  which is a statement I’m fairly confident no one would suggest is true, which helpfully unravels the rest of the nonsense attributed to it very quickly.

Unless it’s a relative you already know is resistant to ever really thinking about anything. Then, it’s just a handy thing to know is going on in the background, so you can happily ignore all their ‘always, never’ statements in the future . . .

No Touching–a desert of affection

 

Seriously.

Have you read about this? A ban on touching (from roughhousing to holding hands, all inclusive) in an elementary school in British Columbia once again proves just how thoroughly out of touch with reality –and basic human needs—too many people working in the school system are.

In his seminal work, Touching, the Human Significance of Skin, Ashley Montague provides decades of scientific research on the benefits of touching and the strange world of what happens to human beings (and, cruelly, monkeys) in the absence of physical affection. Published in 1986, surely at least one person working in the school system, who has studied anything to do with what human offspring need to thrive, has encountered at least the foundation research?

What happens to people when they’re banned from social physical contact has been well-established . . . .

Already living without the most important people in their world, for most of their waking day, now children are not allowed to do the most human of all social activities: bond emotionally with others.

As if the behaviour problems in schools were not already bad enough, with children needing (and not getting) a strong sense of stability and security, with children needing (and not being allowed) to eat when they’re hungry or have silence when they’re overwhelmed or social contact when it’s inconvenient for the teachers, now they’re not allowed to touch a friend… at all.

What cruel world of impersonal body segregation are we working toward, here?

Hey, hang on! Isn’t school supposed to be where kids go to learn to be ‘properly socialized’?!?

17 and 17, the Other Rule

It was pointed out to me that my last post might be misconstrued to be suggesting parents take up hover parenting (which I’ve already indicated I’m opposed to: see Hover Parent) … so I’ll shall clarify:

Giving Your All is not a virtue . . .

There are parents who for some reason think they’re required to be ‘engaging’ with the child 100% of the time the child’s awake, who haven't yet figured out what that’s going to mean to their own eating and bathing requirements.

Parenting & Adulting --all at once

Parents need to get their own work done, but they do not need to get it done while the children are in suspended animation under a desk. 


Children can do the work of their own lives –exploring, learning what adults do to live, feeling safe and happy near their parents —while moms or dads are in the same room (or an immediately adjacent room from which they can hear and frequently look in on what is happening) getting their own work done. 

A very good reason to do this is because children will probably grow up to be adults, so a couple of examples of How To Adult around them from time to time is a help.

Children Do Not Require Directors

Children have their own agendas, needs, and interests. They don't need to be told what to explore and they certainly do not need to be told how to explore things. Learning is a natural human ability and it does not require any authority to make it happen or to make it happen 'better.' 

Martyrs Do Not Make Great Parents

One of the problems Hover Parenting causes is martyrdom in parents, which isn’t fun to live or to live with. 

Martyrdom also has a nasty way of setting up the give in, give up, roll-over, roll-over, roll-over SNAP thing that happens when people concede more than they want to (for any reason) for too long. 

An example from my living room: a mom started out all the patience in the universe (while being beaten gently over the head with a book repeatedly) who freaks out and screams and throws things when the book touched her the 11,003rd time, three days later at her house. 

Which neatly brings me to my other ‘rule’

Never put up with anything for 17 seconds that you are not fully prepared to put up with for 17 years

Obviously, this takes some experiential learning, because who knows what it is that we aren’t going to be able to tolerate for three years when it only just started? But being beaten over the head by a hardboard book is pretty obviously a no-go, and it's a pretty safe bet that waiting for the toddler to get tired of the cool noise it makes is going to take a lot longer than any normal human's patience will last.

In order to be rational and to respect the others around you, don’t accept things you find unacceptable only to snap after the 115th re-run. That’s unstable, unpredictable and uses up a lot of energy that could be better spent virtually anywhere. No one can deal with that kind of chaos, least of all children who look to the adult for a stable foundation. 

And, it is completely fine to say, calmly, “I thought I was going to be able to tolerate that, but I was mistaken. It must stop now and it may not be repeated.” 

No freak-out required . . . .

The 97:400 Rule

I just made this up, so bear with me..



A lovely woman online was bemoaning her five-year-old. Trust me, I know. I’m not doddering enough yet to have forgotten five-year-olds (5yos, henceforth).

I made a comment about how parents generally believe that it’s reasonable to expect a 5yo to… well, the list was pretty long. I suggested the list was, frankly, deranged. 

“Listen*, be respectful, remember to brush teeth, get dressed when told to, eat breakfast” 

_________
*Obey____

… et cetera went the complaining mom's long, long list…

5yos, I know for sure, are at least two years prior to developing the brain parts necessary to be able to cogitate concrete reality. 

While they’re walking around and talking that big vocabulary and generally looking a lot like little real humans, what they really are is real big infants, complete with magical thinking, little impulse control and no understanding of the difference between ‘mom prefers this to be true’ and ‘objective reality.’ 

They are at least two years’ off Concrete Operations, and still firmly implanted in Magical Thinking.

Parents might think it’s reasonable that these ‘mini adults’ can or will or should do . . . whatever . . . but they can’t, won’t and, in fact, should not.

So, what’s the 97:400 Rule?

Any parent with a child under, let’s call it 7 for tidiness… (could be older, is probably capable younger but don’t count on it…) any parent who thinks they can spend more than 3% of their time outside touching/hearing range of their child is probably going to spend a frightful amount of time frustrated. The rule is:

If you choose not to spend 97% of your time with your under-7 child(ren) expect to expend 400% of the energy you have available in any given day week month year dealing with the fallout of that lack of supervision

There is an alluring cultural lie, that children should* something-something-or-other… (obey, understand, ‘get it,’ follow directions, respect someone, remember the rules . . .  same very long list as above, really.)

The fact is, prior to the brain development necessary to perform concrete operations, a child does not have the capacity to ‘get it’ --about any of that list.

Any child you see anywhere who is performing those behaviours at that age has been rehearsed (possibly coerced) and is mimicking, not understanding what they seem to be doing. 

That is: Shirley Temple was a great dancer for a 3yo, a pretty good dancer for an 8yo and a not-very-good dancer at 13. 

Performances can be rehearsed. Children can be coerced into performing Stupid Human Tricks. Understanding requires development. 


The 97:400 Rule

Parents can ‘get it’ that kids need near-constant supervision until they’re about seven, or . . .

. . .  they can spend about four times as much energy as they have available in any given day, week, month, year dealing with the fallout of unsupervised children.

97:400 . . . you pick.

---

*beware of the word ‘should’ --within traps, expectations, disappointments and frustration lie

Digital Addiction

In a conversation elsewhere online, I wrote a response to a discussion about digital ‘addiction’ and whether or not being distracted (and distractible) by things like Facebook and texting was a symptom of addiction… it progressed a little to the stress caused to brains by screen flicker, which is where this begins:

I've read that research, too. I know that screen flicker is stimulating to brains, and there are, certainly a whole lot of people who don't understand the connection between their difficulty sleeping (or their chronic sleep deficit) and their daytime activity/stress levels.

But I, again, see this from a much broader perspective.

This is, to me, the fallout from a (sometimes intentionally) disconnected society. Families are split up into age groups at ever-earlier ages, now there is a movement afoot to 'make sure' all children are safely and 'correctly' cared for by moving them all into age-segregated daycares, a shift further back into infancy from the division of families created by mandatory, age-segregated public school. Some of this can be traced to child-labour laws, forcing kids out of the factories where they worked alongside their siblings and parents, some of it is intentionally-destabilizing people and making them easier to control (see Prussian army, c. 1700s) but a lot of it is ease of management for the staff --but the net effect is the same: families are fragmented at earlier and earlier ages. Does anyone know what the results of that are, for babies who are adapted to need a small handful of the same, steady people for the first 12-15 years of life to learn how to live in our complex cultures to form a stable sense of security within?

That lack of stable security is (sometimes intentionally) disrupted by the fragmentation of families, and results in insecure people: people who don't trust their instincts or their own needs, who often go for years and years without attempting to meet their needs, much less expecting to succeed at meeting them, self-loathing worriers who live in fear of being 'found out', who have no idea at all how to de-stress their own bodies or lives, who live in chronic stress, chronically overwhelmed, chronically insecure... who reach for things that make that insecurity feel further away for a while...

And then we (culturally, technologically) offer them what people have NEVER been any good at handling: abundance. An over-abundance of choice (meaning, the stress of deciding from a 20-item menu adds to the stress of having 14 different size packages of differently-priced, different thickness and quality of toilet paper to choose from, along with 24/7 shopping online and in real life, 24/7 tv on 4000 channels, the non-stop internet and 24/7 live events and activities to do even in many very small towns...) means that, in very practical terms, there are no longer any natural limits. The sun NEVER goes down on what there is to choose from...

In fact, it's common now to run into people my age who simply do not understand 'we ran out' --at stores, restaurants, farms or system bandwidth. So accustomed we are to what looks to us like a 'never-ending supply' (sometimes of debt), it's ordinary for people to have a fit when the size they want is not available because there aren't any, they're so convinced there really are more somewhere but the annoying employee is too lazy to go get them...

The result looks like entitlement, but what it really is, I think, is just expecting there to be lots and lots of everything all the time because that's how life works, naturally, right?

But to the point of the wired world: there are no natural limits. It really simply never ends. The bottle never runs out, the well never runs dry, the opportunity to stay 'connected' at all times, for cheaper and cheaper access costs ... well, that's just the same as how people in Vietnam reacted when heroin was cheap and easier to get than food --who would turn down a hit that makes everything wonderful when without it life is pure stress 100% of the time?

If life wasn't pure stress, 100% of the time, do you think there would be as many people who has as much difficulty handling the distractions?

I don't.

Miley vs. Sinead: Immature against Unwise

I might as well jump into this, since it’s all being touted as ‘good example for kids/girls’ or ‘important lesson to understand.’

I disagree with both suggestions.

I don’t think there is any need for any further examples of an adult woman slut-shaming another in public. I don’t think once she’s done, she should be protected from any equally-insulting return volley on any topic including mental illness, certainly not from someone half their age.

I don’t think the letter is ‘good’ for anyone –not Miley, not onlookers and not Sinead.

Sinead’s position suggests that Miley is an idiotic pawn. While that might be true, with examples like Madonna and Christina Aguilera to draw upon I’d say there is at least an even chance that Miley’s a very savvy entertainer, with a much better idea what sells than Sinead seems to have.

Sinead’s position is condescending. That she chose to be condescending in a public forum has earned Miley’s public response. Should Miley have been the mature, wise one and brushed it off? If that’s the case, what explains Sinead’s reaction to Miley’s response? If that isn’t unwise and immature, I don’t have any words for it at all. Now, they’re both in the same place: unwise and immature.

Are these ‘important lessons’ to anyone? File this under Horrible Warnings.

It can be all about ‘art’ for Sinead, if Sinead wants her career in selling music to be ‘art’ instead of commerce: that is her right and her choice. She is under no obligation to earn money from her creative expression –the vast majority of people don’t. However, that does not have to be anyone else’s choice –not male or female, not at 21 or 71.

Sophia Loren has made it very clear that she is a sex symbol and is delighted and proud to not only have been that, but to remain that today. I happen to agree with her: adult women are allowed to own their sexuality, and they’re allowed (I believe) to express it any way they want to –for money or not, as they choose. Just like men can –Hello, Sean Connery! At any age.

 

Note to Sinead: grow up and learn to communicate with more respect.

Note to Miley: own your choices and brush off the criticism.

Note to kids and girls: It is your body. Your self-esteem is not related to what anyone else thinks about your body, and your whole self-esteem is only partly made up from what you think about your body. Make your own choices and don’t be surprised when some of them come with regrets, some immediately, some later. You have to learn what you need to learn.

Oh, and a tip for everyone: when you’ve learned what you needed to learn, in your own time and in your own way, try to remember to pass on your respect for everyone who allowed you to do that by allowing everyone else to learn in their own time and their own way, too.

Sure, give information and advice when asked, but don’t presume it’s any more welcome to your listener than it was to you at that point in your life.

If you have to pass on Sage Advice From Wiser Heads, at least be wise enough to be respectful.

Things I Want to Say to My Girls

Sometimes, I wonder if we don’t all have an innate form of ‘locked in’ syndrome… of experiencing life from the inside of our heads that feels normal to us, and we never think of sharing with other people…

Twice, recently, I’ve experienced moments of ‘oh, doesn’t everyone do/know that?’

The first was in doing some research about neurology and psychology and the effects and power of mindfulness meditation (weird direction, I’ll grant you, but you just never know what kinds of wonders you’ll find when you look…)

Insula: it’s a part of your (and my) brain that is active in perceiving the body’s internal experience, and is highly attuned to empathy. It is said that people with highly-developed (that is, in neuroplasticity speak, often-used) insula are not only highly empathic with others, but highly self-aware: they can feel what’s going on in their own bodies, including their shifting moods and tension or relaxation and one of the markers for high level insula function is being aware of their on heart beating.

Cue the double-take..

Ask around a bit.

Isn’t that ordinary? Don’t you always feel your heart beating?

That was surprise number one.

The second one I stumbled upon while re-reading Dan Baker’s lovely (I highly recommend it) What Happy People Know. He refers obliquely to one of the sources of happiness in life being about choice, specifically being aware of our personal choices regarding not only our lives, but also what we’re good at and value. It reads:

Why am I so sure that’s who I am? Because that’s exactly whom I chose to be. I put tremendous effort into making these choices. I eliminated many other possibilities and poured my heart into the ones that fit me best.

Which got me thinking about the multiple talents and abilities I am aware of having (that old self-awareness thingy again) and have no intention or interest in using or developing further, or, perhaps more relevant to the title of this piece as you’ll see in a moment I hope, earning money from… For example, whenever the option to sell things (home party kinds of things) comes up, which is virtually every time I attend one and someone notices that I’m good at retaining all kinds of information and chatting up the benefits, etc… Yes, I know, but I still also know that I’m not willing to do what I know it takes to be successful in that business and I have no interest in participating in it –no, really, not even for the potential for vast amounts of money. I get it, I’m weird.

But what I just realized I’m not sure I ever told my girls –because it’s one of those ‘doesn’t everyone know this?’ – is

you don’t have to do what you’re good at just because you’re good at it

You are good at so many things, you can pick the one(s) that you want to use, not only the ones other people notice or that other people value, and certainly not all of them if you don’t wanna…

Just sayin’ … ‘cause you may not have noticed…

 

Addiction and Choice

 

Recommended reading: Addiction, a disorder of choice, by Gene M. Heyman …

When we subject children to anti-drug propaganda* we may be taking for granted a few propositions that have not been established outside the ‘my pappy tol’ me so’ and ‘some dude in a pub said’ frames.

As Heyman’s thesis valiantly proves, addiction is absolutely a voluntary choice and is absolutely not a disease.

I’ll summarize the argument for the second claim first, because it’s so universally accepted today. If alcoholism, smoking, heavy drug use and oxycodone abuse were diseases, it would not be possible to ‘quit.’ Not with a change of attitude, not with rehab and not with meetings –all of which can and do end addiction in real life. More than 80% of heavy, chronic drug users quit on their own, by choice, most of them before they’re 30 (they also typically start at 18.) If the disease model made sense, then MS and diabetes could be ‘quit’ with the help of rehab or meetings, which is a ridiculous suggestion.

On to the voluntary choice aspect. Because a lot of the research on the subject tends to be done by economists, rather than mothers of 14-year-old boys, they often take it as read that people do not voluntarily choose self-destructive options. Anyone who has ever seen Jackass or its many imitators can snort at that idea. Clearly, people do, rather more often than most parents are comfortable, make choices that are not in the best interest of anyone, including themselves.

What’s going on?

It turns out that one other things economists get wrong is the frame in which the decisions are being made. Economists look at ‘market baskets’ –like a collection of possible spending choices for someone’s discretionary income, and see that overall people tend to make reasonably sensible choices: the ‘best interest’ model. Yet people have rationally pointed out that there are a great many people who are bankrupt –or being evicted for non-payment of rent, with big screen tvs and smartphones—that rather argues against the theory. The frame economists use, in Heyman’s terminology, is a global framework for decision making, and it does tend away from self-destructive and toward best interest. In drug use, this means that when someone frames the ‘will I use cocaine now?’ question in terms of ‘is this the best use of the next $150 and 4 hours of my time, considering my life goals?’ the answer is very, very different from a ‘local’ viewpoint.

The local view is ‘will I suffer through the craving now?’ In short-term decision-making, people will very often make self-destructive and even openly suicidal choices. In my post about lacking resources (Anti-Resourceful), I described one such devastating decision from my hometown. It is not irrational, from a ‘this moment’s pleasure’ standpoint, to use drugs instead of living through withdrawal.

So, to drug education

What do we tell the children, and what ‘works’ for avoiding hard core drug addiction?

As much as we don’t really believe it will work (hence the propaganda*) the answer is: The Truth.

The truth includes the fact that drugs use money, energy, resources and time in a way that does not get anyone closer to their personal goals in life. It’s uncommon knowledge, but you only get to spend this dollar, this bit of energy and this minute once.

The truth includes the fact that most people who experiment with drugs have their own very good reasons for not becoming habitual users, and it’s probably worth forty minutes of your life to figure out what yours are.

The truth includes the fact that there are many potentially-devastating side effects from most potent drugs, and in spite of the fact that the odds of ending up with any or all of them are really pretty small, without the drug use the odds are much nearer to zero.

The truth includes the fact that drug use has some real attractions that are genuinely hard to beat with anything else in the world, but none of those eradicate any of the other truths, including the fact that quitting is filled with suffering, often for a good long time.

The truth includes the fact that the majority of successful people look down on both the effects and the users of mood-altering substances particularly when the use can no longer be easily contained to non-productive hours, or when the urge to use spills out into criminal and anti-social behaviour. All people need the respect and goodwill of their friends and neighbours and while you’ll certainly be popular with your dealer/supplier and your buddy users, you will also certainly be restricting your social circle dramatically.

Do we have to get into dire threats and fictional statistics? I don’t think so. In fact, it would be ever so much better if we didn’t.

___

* Propaganda defined: amplified, simplified and vilified info-tainment designed to coerce underlings into believing whatever overlings have determined to be ‘best’ for them, regardless of any accuracy of statements…

Bad News: You Won’t Find Out

In conversation with a dear friend yesterday, I premembered … (premembered is a word a friend’s kid invented, that means something like ‘later, I’m going to remember this way of explaining something I’ve kind of known for a long time’) … something about education and its inherent flaws.

I had been talking about a conversation (meta!) that I’d had earlier, in which there was discussion about how silly it is that the school system doesn’t teach people anything they really need to know: like how to be a good parent … or how to learn things for your own reasons on your own, or how to think, or be an enlightened human being. That’s when I premembered:

You usually won’t find out what it is you need to know until after you needed to know it.

This applies to most work, and most parenting.

To ‘Make Sure’

 

Ran across a great ‘zen’ quote while stumbling yesterday:

Let go… or be dragged

Then, it came up in a conversation about ‘making sure’ –with teenagers.

‘Making sure’ is probably the most alluring, and least effective, form of security a parent can seek.

No parent wants to face the reality of the terrors of freeing a child to the world. As possibly-Phyllis Diller said:

having a child is giving your heart permission to walk around by itself for the rest of your life

Parenting is terrifying, and letting go is even more terrifying. It’s hard to do when a two-year-old wants to wear all their favourite clothes at once…

… without thinking about what they’re allowed to do with a computer.

When a 15-year-old struggles for independence and liberty, it’s not easier to let go. It’s particularly not easier than it would have been when the child was three. But that’s water under the bridge and time can’t flow backwards.

But ‘making sure’ has a synonym. That is: ‘making a mess.’

Trying to control the thoughts, feelings, goals and preferences of a child (especially a teenage child) is pretty much guaranteed to get messy. Some kids can withstand a lot of it, without it affecting who they are, or what they choose, very much… but those kids are rare (and it’s inherently disrespectful to them, too… they just don’t mind so much that their parents are.)

For most kids, the lack of faith in them that this ‘making sure’ demonstrates does real damage to their stability. They react in ways that are surprising even to them: they vandalize things, they sneak out at night, they make cavalier choices with their lives and bodies, they check-out of things they once cared about, they disconnect from the people they need…

Yes, trusting that the world is a safe-enough place for our precious teens is hard. Trust anyhow.

Yes, trusting teens out in the world is hard. Trust anyhow.

Yes, trusting that we’ve been ‘good enough’ parents to this point, so our kids will be able to cope (and maybe even thrive) is hard. Trust anyhow.

Yes, letting go is hard. Let go anyhow.

Let go… or be dragged.

Building a Brain

When I was a new mom, I was learning about neural networks and how memory and learning work in a biomechanical sense. Did you know that every time a newborn has an experience that ‘works’ –they get milk, they get to be close to mom, they get clean, they get sleep—their brains are building synapses? Those are links between neurons that will eventually make neural pathways.

One of the fun pieces of brain development science that has been discovered is that the more you do a thing, the faster and more automatically your brain will replicate the thing. It’s not just ‘training your arm’ to throw a ball, it’s training your brain to build strong neural pathways so ‘throwing a ball’ becomes a high-speed highway of connections that make throwing a ball an act completed without confusion, thought, decisions or concentration.

For newborns, this means that if snuggling this way, and suckling this way results in a warm, fully belly, they are likely to do it again. And tomorrow, they’ll do it again and again and again. Every success strengthens the pathway. So, while the first time they tried it, it was pleasant… and a neural path was ‘walked’ through the grey matter… it’s the fifth or seventieth ‘walk’ down the same pathway that has made it visible as a track.

Initially, the synaptic ‘walk’ might be confusing and hard to retrace (poor little confused baby trying to figure out how to latch on again at 3 days old) but every single success makes the pathway stronger. Stronger pathways make for more-skilled brains…

Practice doesn’t make perfect… but it does make brains more complex.

Evil in the News–and parenting fears

Lots of fodder for the ‘what if I screw it up’ fears, of late… between drug addicts eating other people to narcissists killing kittens and people for fun and fame… what lovely texture to give to a parent’s nightmares of ‘how bad it can go wrong.’

I will never suggest that the fears are irrational: clearly, these charming individuals exist, and clearly at some point they had parents.

Whatever could go so  wrong that the adult product is so much of a mess?

In a lecture given by Dr. Gordon Neufeld, he describes a cultural problem that most people are not even aware is a problem –the generation of children who are not being invited into the generation of adults. While it’s new (he speculates 1960s) and radically different from all that’s come before, it’s already something that most parents feel is normal. How quickly social change becomes normal is astonishing. Two generations, and a completely new way of being in the world is ordinary and old. Today, it’s perfectly ordinary to assume the children will be happier among ‘their own kind’ and routine advice that adults ensure they have child-free time to themselves, to do the real things of real life, uninterrupted by the inconveniences and irrelevancies of childhood.

I noticed a long time ago that the people who spent the most time away from their children during the week were the same people with long lists of babysitters and child-only activities for the evenings and weekends and school breaks –something about not being around children most of the day seems to destroy a parent’s confidence? willingness? ability? their naturally-bonded desire to spend time with their children.

Dr. Neufeld’s point is that these are children growing up attached to their peers –they look to their peers for ‘how to be people’ and are virtually uninfluencable by the adults who a mere half century ago would have been the guiding stars of their lives, who they strove to be like and to be accepted by.

Today, when the charming youngsters, like Luka Magnotta and Karla Homolka are learning from each other’s company ‘how to be human,’ you can readily see what the core problem is.

It’s long been known that factors like unwantedness (just the fact that a child was unexpected and unwanted), single parenthood, unwed mothers, absentee fathers, poverty … it’s long been known that these are linked in much higher numbers to anti-social youths, and violent crime.

Today, we have ‘nice families’ producing the monsters of tomorrow, within stable and often wealthy wedlock, where the children were often not only wanted but sought after with tens of thousands of dollars worth of fertility treatments and international adoptions… and the chain that links these kids with the poor, inner-city teenage mothers of the past is peer attachment.

The child born of a 16 year old mother is not guaranteed to be raised without attachment to the adults in the world, in fact, that child may have far more stable collection of caring adults who stay close and care deeply about how the child lives than many children who move from suburb to suburb, with upwardly mobile (wealthy) parents –and a long chain of strangers providing daycare and education and sports coaching for the vast majority of their days.

Children need to know that they are cared for by the important adults in their world –parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents–so that their primary concern as they grow up is that they fit in with them, not whether or not they ‘fit in’ with kids like Karla and Luka…

Relationships with Humans

 

Relationships with humans are hard.

I’ve been having interesting conversations with folks about teens, rebellion and the ‘need’ (experts tell us it’s a need, so it must be, right?) for children to butt heads with their parents in order to leave the nest.

I’ve written about this before, but today I’m thinking about it from a slightly different angle… in a conversation about ‘normal teens,’ in response to this:

Some children really DO need to "butt heads to leave".

I said this:

In the same way that people who are genuinely frightened (the result of a break-in, or even a physical attack) start arguing when they don’t know what else to do with their fear, people who are leaving or on the verge of being left will often lash out, because they simply don’t know how to handle the fears or the overwhelming feelings that come with large life changes.

I’ve lived in a navy family my whole life, first as the daughter of a sailor, and later married to one (still). I am experienced in the leavings (and returns) of loved ones… and I’m familiar with the dysfunctional and the enlightened ways of handling both.

Dysfunctional is what is considered the norm: depression, lashing out, infidelity, worry, ptsd, insomnia, ocd… the list goes on and on. But however ordinary and common those responses are, they’re hardly enlightened or even helpful. They are simply what people do with overwhelmingly large emotions when they don’t know what else to do.

It’s not surprising that people don’t know what to do –culturally, we don’t know what to do, we have few models of more enlightened or mature responses, and few teachers who could pass that information on. If I had a nickel for every time someone said to me, ‘I could never cope with my partner leaving’ or ‘how do you manage?’ I’d have a room full of nickels. And, it took me a long time to stumble across healthier ways of handling it.

Children leaving home brings up the same kinds of overwhelm, for themselves and their parents –and their friends, and their siblings… and we end up with the Freshman 15 (kids who eat to displace their feelings when they’re at college the first year) and Empty Nest Syndrome (for parents who can’t sit through long-distance ads without bursting into tears), et cetera.

There are two keys, I found, to understand comings and goings:

1. worry and,

2. control

There are two primary reasons people mind so much, life transitions of this kind: they don’t know what’s going to happen, and they don’t like feeling out of control of what’s going to happen. So they worry –that’s personal and internal stress that just adds to the real issues in their world—and they seek to control what they can reach, which is generally the other people close by. [I think it’s hilarious how rarely most people think of themselves when they’re looking around for something to control.]

Now, how to avoid and minimize both of those is a completely other post for another day, but that’s the core of it: children who express an apparent need to butt heads are picking #2. Parents who become depressed, teary or insomniac are using #1. Lashing out and ocd are #2. PTSD is #1.

Handling comings and goings with equanimity is hard:

• it’s hard to lean into the pain of separations, to know that the pain is not just okay, but perfect
• it’s hard to open a lifestyle up when someone comes home after the heartspace they had lived in has healed

Neither are anywhere near as hard as the results of lashing out, butting heads, depression… et cetera.

Year-Round Education

Here comes the same-old same-old again: kids need continuous instruction lest they ‘lose’ what they’ve learned so far, over the 9 week summer break.

British Columbia has recently moved to allow schools to step out of the traditional 180 days between September and June model that we all grew up on and think of as ‘normal’.

There is going to be fallout. It is not going to be pretty.

And, from Ontario, appears this study from which comes this hilarious quote:

However, the Second Career students achieved significantly higher grades than any of the others. The Second Career program was designed by the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities to provide laid off workers with skills training to assist them in finding employment in high demand occupations. Individual received government grants to support them in their studies. Since most members of this group have probably been out of school for some time, this is a result of particular interest. It should certainly stimulate further deliberation over the factors that affect achievement in college mathematics most significantly.

Where oh where is my sarcasm font? Hmm… this one looks good: The longer students are out of school, the better they perform in math?! Could it be that living and working in the real world is better for learning real math skills than learning from teachers in schools? Get away!

Now, what are the Educating Eyeores (thank you, Benjamin Hoff, and The Te of Piglet!!) going to do with this? The EEs say ‘ooh, it’s not working –start it earlier!’ ‘Oh, no, it’s not working –do it longer!’ ‘Eeek, it’s not working –try it harder!’

Which part of ‘it’s not working’ is failing to get through?

I’m not as darkly cynical (if you can imagine!) as some of my friends. One of them claims the reason it doesn’t matter that the entire school system has been a proven failure for decades, because it’s primary mandate is a total success: jobs for adults.

A young adult I know claims it’s worse than that: free babysitting.

Well, at least it will be year-round babysitting jobs for adults.

Messy Bedrooms –by design

If anyone is ever wondering why it is that kids’ rooms today tend to be (a lot) messier than they were in Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best, allow me to make a list:

• musical instruments
• computers
• software
• peripherals
• game systems
• games
• tvs
• dvd players
• dvds
• books and magazines
• 81 pairs of underwear and shirts, more than 12 pairs of jeans, multiple sets of every season’s outerwear
• multiple pairs of shoes (more than 2)
• sports equipment
• cds
• accessories (hats, necklaces, jewelery, belts)
• arts, crafts and school supplies
• decor items
• gifts from every holiday and event throughout the year, including one from every single party they took a gift to this year

In 1955, most kids would have owned play clothes and ‘good’ clothes, possibly enough shirts and underwear to make it through a whole week without having to wear anything but pants twice. They would have worn their ‘good’ clothes to any special event requiring them, from weekly church to weddings and funerals.

In 1955, kids would have, with rare exception, owned nothing but the gifts they received for their birthdays (supposing it wasn’t clothing or bath supplies) and Christmas, usually only from three or four people. Bikes lived outside, ski gear lived in the attic or the basement with the (solitary) box of seasonal decorations.

The TV Distortion

Watching M*A*S*H reruns so many times meant that I realized TV is different from real life in one really important way: props storage.

Within a couple of seasons of that show, they had so many silly costumes (gorilla suit, kimonos, everyone in pinstripes, Klinger’s dress collection), strange props (the bathtub, the party props, art supplies, Radar’s animals, horse tack) and new things (Christmas gifts, presents for BJ’s birthday, Margaret’s growing collection of things from gentlemen callers) run through the hands of those characters, they could (and probably did) fill a warehouse. Not a set of tents made to collapse, put in trucks, and drive down the road on two days’ notice.

Old Time Design Today

Today’s kids’ bedrooms have not be dramatically re-designed, with 50 times the amount of storage as the houses built in 1955. In fact, it’s the opposite: bedrooms are smaller, and there is less storage space built into homes today –no unfinished basements, no attics, linen closets are a rarity –than those of the 1950s and 60s.

Today, kids have less drawer-space per wardrobe item they own, less closet space per sports team they play on and less shelf-space per category of toys than kids had in 1955. The Beav played baseball with nothing but a glove, a bat and a ball –the softball girls I umpire have sliders, cleats, gloves, batting gloves, uniforms, batting helmets and a great many of them have their own bat. The Beav could leave his glove on the top of his high-boy bureau; these girls can’t even fit all their equipment for this sport on a 6-drawer dresser… supposing they don’t also play hockey, soccer… et cetera.

Until bedrooms (playrooms, rec rooms and houses) are re-designed with the volume of objects a ‘normal’ child owns in mind, the idea that an over-filled room can be kept incidentally-clean is irrational. By ‘incidentally clean’ I mean that without spending a great deal of the day carefully stacking, and re-stacking everything in piles alongside the woefully-lacking storage available, to keep it all neat.

We live in a ‘grab and go’ culture, with kids often racing between activities. That they (also) drop things in the hallway or on the floor of their rooms before rifling through the pile that’s already growing to find the stuff needed for the next thing… well, it’s simply a design flaw.

Scary Child

 

There is certainly a trend of parents seeking help with what one author called ‘explosive’ children… while discussing the subject on a mom’s forum, I wrote this:

“Did you notice the creepy smile on his face? Doesn't that just scare the hair off you?

“Only their diligence and creativity in ensuring they find a way to get attention is more amazing than the emotional flatness and the smile. this child is certainly exhibiting diligence and creativity. The hyper-focus and flatness is the diligence (he's really working hard at this problem) and the smile or giggliness is just the relief in having succeeded.”

Harkening back to Don C. Dinkmeyer’s inimitable STEP –Systematic Training for Effective Parenting, I remind parents: all behaviour has goals.

Those goals are noble, upstanding and decent. No matter what the resulting behaviour looks like.

In STEP, Dinkmeyer points out that the ‘goal’ of behaviour that irritates parents is always attention. When parents want revenge, it’s power.  When a parent feels hurt, the goal is revenge for hurts the child’s experienced. When parents feel like giving up, the child needs to feel like he measures up. I think he missed one, though: when a child’s behaviour scares parents –in its intensity, its diligence, its incredible focus – that’s the one that gets trotted off to the child psychologist for a round of tests and a collection of labels.

But there is a way of dealing with this, without the experts and without the labels and programs and dietary changes and supplements and coloured chairs and tinted glasses…

Parents often ask ‘why is my child so angry?’ I think this is the best of all possible questions, but the answer is unwelcome. It’s unflattering, insulting and cruel:

… because our culture is vicious to children, dismisses their needs and generally treats them in a completely reprehensible manner, which understandably makes them mad.

A few examples:

• what possible difference can it make to anything in a child’s care or life, how many times the planet has gone around the sun?
• what possible relevance is the hour on the clock to any bodily function –from eating to sleeping, if the body needs it what has the time to do with it?
• when did humans become machines, required to withstand scheduled repetition regardless of their individual pace, needs or growth patterns?
• when did a child’s need for parents get replaced with ‘anyone’ who was ‘qualified’ to care for them?
• where did the idea of ‘fun’ or ‘kids’ food come from, and why is it always the least nutritious of any possible option?
• why are children required to make adult decisions, or deal with adult situations alone, but not held capable of being children without direction?
• when even the slow-moving, inherently-dense laws recognize the developmental inability of children to understand things like contract law and the intent to harm required for legal culpability, why is it we still think a 3-year-old (or even a 9 year old) needs to participate in negotiations, and suffer imposed, artificial ‘consequences’ for their actions?
• when did nurturing our families go out of style –and why is it the mantra of every sophisticated adult in the Western world ‘me time’ and ‘getting away from the kids’? Do we think they’re deaf, or just stupid?

But What to Do?!?

The answer is simple (which is not to say, or imply, ‘easy’) – back up the bus.

Eliminate a lot of the schedule, even while saying ‘all our other kids had no trouble handling this much’ –because this child is not coping with it.

Slow down. One outing a day… or less. One visitor a day… or less. Select a school with smaller class sizes… or skip it entirely. Yes, some children thrive on lots. This is not that child.

Was there a time in this child’s life when s/he thrived? What was different about that? Was it outdoors? Was it summer holidays? Was it a small, cooperative preschool? Was it life at home with mom and siblings only?

For some people, getting up early and having to be somewhere on time and not having their loving people around them for a sense of security through a long day or sitting still indoors and  being in a crowd of 24 or 31 other kids who all want and need a variety of things and the terrors of the schoolyard and the demands of the classwork that may be completely misunderstood, too early, too late or just in a room filled with distractions and the teacher’s changing mood, impatience, shouting, confusing mixed messages even when directed at someone else in the room and the stress of waiting a few extra minutes to be picked up when someone’s running late and a different collection of kids and adults at afterschool care or activities and homework demanding they sit still indoors some more, or work some more on work that is too challenging or too easy and having to go to bed ‘on time’ after having had no liberty, no pause, no free time… maybe after a tense dinner of unfamiliar flavours, or demands to eat unpalatable food, or feeling kind of ill from being over-hungry or overtired or having too much sugar earlier…

We think all of that is ‘normal’ for kids to be able to just buck up and deal with… and for a lot of children, it may even seem completely fine (regardless of how common nervous habits are in 8 year olds, or how many resistant, rebellious teens it seems to create).

These ‘explosive’ children are not those children.

Nor should they be.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Photo ‘Concentrado’ by Eduardo Mueses Used with permission Creative Commons Attrib/Comm

Risky Business

Children’s needs are really very simple –as are all humans’. Children need what we all need (thank you, William Glasser!):

• security
• love and a sense of belonging (attention)
• power
• freedom
• fun

What I’ve noticed is that from a child’s point of view, it doesn’t matter very much what it is, because all of them can be fixed by returning to the top.

It seems almost as if a child’s making deals with the universe, as their behaviour deteriorates: Fine. If I can’t have security, I’ll take a sense of belonging. Which flows down the list almost naturally: Fine, if I can’t have love, I’ll take power… if I can’t have power, I’ll have freedom… if I can’t have freedom, I’ll take fun.

Fun is the end where kids light their houses on fire, or find themselves being featured on Web Soup because their friends are having ‘fun’ too…

Video Games - E3 2012

'… wish I’d overheard the conversation that led up to this …

These kids are seriously missing something, and while ‘brain cells’ is the obvious answer, I’ll offer the ‘not so obvious’ answer instead:

Attention

They need it, and they will get it, even if it means the kind of negative attention idiotic stunts like this garner. They might appear to be suicidal, but to the twit child involved, it’s essential to life that they get what they need, so risking a little life and limb in the process is totally fine.

For a while, this is going to look a lot like ‘blame the parents’ except it’s a more textured point than that. For now, let me say: a child who is acting out on this scale is screaming a desperate need for attention that child is not getting.

Starving children cry in hunger. Exhausted children stumble around and whimper at the least thing. Thirsty children beg for water. No one would say ‘oh, the child is clearly hungry, exhausted and thirsty, give her a Barbie.’

But somehow, when it’s attention, almost anything else will be thrown at the child instead. It’s like attention is the most valuable and scarce commodity on the planet, so there is simply no way of ever meeting a child’s frivolous and insatiable demand for it.

Parents will say ‘I was right there with them, the whole time!’ Yes? Doing what? Quietly watching them without personal distractions, activities or ‘important work’ to complete?

Nattering non-stop at a child is not ‘attention’. Talking about children isn’t attention, either. Neither is shopping them around to any expert you can find in the neighbourhood who might be able to ‘fix’ or ‘prescribe’ or, with any luck at all, ‘take away’ the problem/child. Worrying about the child while lying in bed awake half the night isn’t either. Ordering a child around isn’t. Neither is looking up for 4 seconds while distracted by the paper, tv, computer, game, magazine, cooking, cleaning, phone conversation, only to drift slowly back to whatever it is while vaguely saying ‘uh-hunh…’

We often mistake 'doing things with' or worse, 'doing things alongside' or worst of all 'always doing whatever he wants' as the same as 'attention.' Nothing could be further from reality. It is possible to pay attention to someone else in the room while they are occupied in a solitary endeavour, while you get on with your own stuff. It takes practice, and awareness of what it really is about --but attention is actually a lot less draining than 'agreeing,' 'loyalty,' and 'unceasing participation in identical activities' --the substitutes that often stand in for genuine attention…

What Works is Simple

That's because it is nothing more than standing (or sitting, or lying down) in a space of willingness to see the child, whole, here and now... to listen with patience and attention to what the child needs to say, completely, here and now... to feel the child's emotional expression as it is, in its entirety, here and now. If that means 'yes, I can see that frustrating you enormously, and I was thinking about you while I was watching... I wonder what you want to do about that...'  or 'I hear you telling me about all the differences between the 376,541 pokemon cards available and how they fascinate you completely,' then that's what is needed now. If that means sensing the increasing need to be seen and meeting it with placid eye contact, while the child looks from you to what he's doing and back to you and back to what he's doing 10 times in 3 minutes in silence --do you have any experience of having someone who loves you just seeing you, whatever you're doing, and making eye contact whenever you happen to look up?

Just here and now, as it really is right here and right now. In a moment or three, you'll be free to get back to whatever you were doing, with a rejuvenated child feeling filled up again..."

Photo used with permission: Creative Commons Comm/Attrib Raphael Goetter 'Monde'