It’s About Making Babies!

Chrunchy Chicken admits to wanting help dealing with kids acting out, with short school days and enforced confinement at home. She wants to learn “Slow Parenting“.

What about you parents out there? Have you found a happy medium in dealing with the kids? Or do you fantasize about putting them up in a listing on Craigslist?

I did some substitute school teaching a few years back. Classroom discipline is one of the hardest parts of the job. One resource I commend to all parents is “Tools for Teaching” by Fred Jones. A couple of pointers from the classroom:

- The red zone. It turns out that there is a kind of distance-defined zone about a teacher (parent). Within three or four feet, kids tend to behave well, attend to their work or whatever. This is all completely passive. Out to about six to eight feet is a yellow zone, where the mere presence of an adult has less effect. Beyond that is the red zone. In the classroom, the way to get a child into the green zone, from kindergarten through high school in my experience, is to walk through the class. Roam the aisles between seats. You need to “expose” each student every few minutes. Try to sit down – and invite whispering, tossing, playing games and reading comics. Time and experience adds persistence and discipline. With practice you can make do with a pass every ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, but you have to stay on top of it. For parents? keep an eye on things. Wander in and out regularly. If you want them to behave as if you were standing there watching them, let them know you are keeping track, and watching regularly.

- Dealing with your own anger. When you first feel the irritation, take a calming breath. It takes 28 minutes for the adrenaline kicking in to cycle through and be flushed from your system. Be aware that you will be affected by the aggressive tendencies and heightened responses of the adrenaline. The good news is that it takes several minutes to build up full steam. By taking a deep, calming breath, by taking charge of the adrenaline circus, you diminish the full brunt of an encounter. You make better judgments and react more appropriately.

- Calming the yelling. When a child is throwing a tantrum or shouting, that is the last time you want to yell. Keep your voice at a normal or lower pitch and volume, and they have to get quieter to hear you. Yell, and you set them a new objective to overpower.

(I save yelling for imminent danger events and times.)

From my own life:

o – “If you can’t see my lips, I cannot hear you.” My sister and I had a horrible time teaching this to my mother. But it worked. Yelling from the next room, or the smallest room, is an expression of disrespect, and assumes that what is heard is understood – when often it isn’t. Yelling louder isn’t the answer – communicating is.

o – You might try a tactic from military movies. Instead of “stop this” which leaves worlds of opportunities for undesirable things *to* do, how about “Take this old toothbrush and clean the toilet.” and “Go weed the garden, after you clear the snow from the sidewalk.” Or “Vacuum the living room/clean your room/make pizza/make some !?$** chocolate chip cookies! Now!” (I prefer to substitute the word “silly” for “!?$**”, but your mileage may vary.)

And you might try to understand what each wanted from an encounter. A specific toy or object may just be a symbol for wanting to play together, or feeling bad or frustrated about something unrelated. This might be a child version of coming home from work with a bad mood, and letting it affect the family. Learning to deal with such things early can improve self awareness, communication and problem solving skills. When you can catch friction in action before things escalate beyond discipline (the will to complete a task) into a need for disciplinary action, you have opportunities to teach, to share, and to guide. And maybe, those times you get it right, polish up a reputation as someone all-knowing and infallible. “Mom”.

Blessed be.

* While reading “Tools for Teaching” I found the book very easy to read and understand. At the time I was helping my neighbor work with his cattle, and I immediately, as I progressed through the classroom discipline parts of the book, saw things go better in the classroom – and in the neighbor’s pasture. Just changing my perspective and understanding made a noticeable difference.

One last point from the book – weenie parents. If you are going to give in to your child, do it the first time he/she asks. If you ever wear down from constant asking, or allow repeated requests, you teach the child that begging works – and is a viable and useful communication tactic. This *will* cause pain to student and teacher when the teacher has to de-program that habit in the classroom. Smart students learn that whingeing doesn’t work *at school*, mostly, *not* that whingeing doesn’t work at all. All the parent need to do is to hear and consider every request, and only give the “final answer”. Repeated requests are an expression of disrespect for the parent, and should be dealt with.

NML wrote about men breaking up with women on Baggage Reclaim – and if he breaks up with her, does that make him an a**clown?

The focus on the piece is not the name calling about the loser, abusive so-and-so that ended the relationship – the point is to accept that the relationship is over.

A**clowns

Some (few) women need Baggage Reclaim’s straight-forward approach to end a cycle of inappropriate, abusive, manipulative, and demeaning relationships. And NML keeps things on target. Women that continue to pick inappropriate partners, that fail to pay attention to warning signs will have to restore their self esteem, and use a renewed (new?) sense of self-worth when picking their next partner-candidate. The fact that dysfunctional partners won’t “get better”, won’t change no matter what, keeps these hopeful and often isolated women from seeing reality, from taking charge of their lives. Their own fears keep them from seeing clearly, or understanding what they see.

Because many of the partners to the women visiting Baggage Reclaim, and that NML had way to much experience with, are unknowing or deliberately bad news in any relationship, many have earned the label “a**clown”. Hence the title of her post. I prefer “bozo”.

Biggest reason for all relationships to go bad.

Most of the problems of the continuously awful sequence of relationships in a woman’s life are about who and how she picks someone to get intimate with.

A comedian made a strong point on the Today show recently. Asked, why do men cheat?

Anytime a guy cheats, you have a failure of character.

[Emphasis added. bk]

The Modern Fairy Tale of Love

No one, apparently, wants to tell children and young people what family and togetherness is all about. Yes, newlyweds are told “You have to work to make a marriage work.” But the people describing what to do are charging $500 for a weekend seminar about why their $3500 Making Marriage Work course will make their lives happy.

The placebo effect – pay $4k for advice, and usually you get better regardless of whether the advice was worth 10 cents – keeps these secrets “secret” and get-rich-quick schemes in business.

But, really, getting together is about culture, beliefs, economic and physical security – about family. We come together to create a home, a place to live that: when we need to come there, they have to take us in. (I forget the reference, it was a beloved SF novel).

The home

A home is (should be!) a safe place. A place where the values of what is worthwhile and what is to be avoided are agreed upon. A place where we receive the respect we earn. A place to be close to those we cherish, care for, and depend upon. A house is a dwelling, a constructed building. A home shelters a family.

The family

We come together not to wrest benefits from employers and insurers and the IRS, though many lawyers make a good living taking that position. We come together to create a family.

For many of us, our parents and siblings (brothers and sisters, those social science twerps have weird names for the darndest things) provide our first experience with family. Others don’t grow up knowing the bonds within and between families, except maybe in reading, or TV and movies – or the lucky ones with “family”d friends.

A family is a deliberate choice to make a home, a unit of culture and beliefs, security and affection, to sustain each other. A choice to raise children is a choice to pass the family, cultural, social, and faith beliefs and practices on to the next generation. Whether you patriotically choose to “raise sons for the Army” or to honor those that brought you into the world, that shared their view of life and taught you about love, children are how we perpetuate the community, the nation, and the family.

Relationship endings

Right. This is the topic we started with. Because our modern fairy tale of love is that we find someone, meet, fall in love, and settle down.

Courting

There was a time when “courting”, “sparking” was assumed to be sexually intimate. When asking a girl’s father for permission to court her was akin to an engagement, back before engagement ring merchants got their lucrative business into everyone else’s business. The expectation was that unless things went seriously awry, getting Daddy’s permission to take a girl out meant this was the last girl he took out before marrying her. “Intentions” originally meant, “do you intend to marry my daughter?” when asked, “What are your intentions toward my daughter?”

As Robert Frezza expressed it in “McLendon’s Syndrome” (a silly space opera science fiction novel)

The wedding was a formal one.
The father of the bride wore a white shotgun.

The purpose, of course, was to screen out undesirables. In the 1950′s the practice devolved to the awkward parody as seen in “Peggy Sue Got Married .. Or Did She?” – did the guy show respect toward authority, arrive sober and respectfully dressed. Whether the parent’s knew the kid’s family and the reputation of the kid and the kid’s family was no longer “cool” to worry about. As a culture, we were losing the guidance (interference!) of the community in forming couples and families.

We lost sight of what character and discipline mean. At least, some of us did. Some families, communities, and faiths maintain today a solid core of people that understand that finding a “good” man or woman is an economic, cultural, and faithful search. “Good” families revere honor, honesty, respect – and their children are likely to make better choices than those needing Baggage Reclaim.

In a small community, holding a “good” job is more than how much income the job provides. It is an indication of character – who did you ask for a job, did they offer the job, how do you get along with the boss and others. Fights, temper, substance abuse, honor and honesty – the community knows all about everything that could be gossiped about. The quality of work, the number and caliber of people that respect you and your work – these count when you ask Daddy to court his daughter. Or it used to.

Picking a partner

One of the horrible things modern marketing has done to us as a culture is to create the myth that the American Dream (in capitals, with dollar signs) is the single family home. I think the home part is right, but the single family dwelling part is to enrich builders and realtors. And isolating families at the time they most need communication with slightly older families – when they are learning to raise children – has been catastrophic for us mere Americans.

We also see the Playboy Philosophy – screw eyecandy, anytime you can – enlivening beer and car ads, and many other products from lingerie to fashion, and cosmetics. Mistakenly, we look to bars and other places “beautiful” people hang out for companions. We look for sex adventures, just like the glossy magazines and ads say, instead of a stable and dependable mate-prospect.

The big difference I see between long-lasting marriages and strings of badly ending relationships – is who you pick for a partner. And why you pick that partner.

Make a family

Pick a partner interested in building a family, capable of being a responsible and disciplined mate (and co-parent, if children are anticipated), of a suitable character – clean of habit, honest, honorable, compassionate, and has good emotional bonds with friends and family – you can have a good relationship. Except – if one of you is interested in a family, in forming a permanent aspect of family and community – both have to be.

A woman that wants the security and love of a home, won’t keep a guy around that wants a quick sex adventure. Likewise, a lady looking for excitement won’t meet the needs of a guy looking for a home.

Endings

As the Jim Stafford song about “Wildwood Flower” (marijuana) goes,

“.. All good things gotta come to an end ..”

Or, as a commenter to NML’s post wrote,

Every story has an ending in death. Death of the person, or death of the so called relationship.

I think the journey is more important than the destination. Each relationship we make, every encounter we have with another idea or person, changes us. We get opportunities in life, every day, to affect others, to maintain or build new things – to grow.

We should choose to meet and become friends with people we admire – people of character. That way we are more likely to develop healthy habits. We want companions that care about family and community rather than sex-adventures. We want to develop friendships with people we respect, and that respect others.

And if we find someone to build a home and family with, we want someone that helps us develop a unit of culture and closeness that encourages us and those around us. A life, or portion of a life, spent with someone we love is much more than “will end in death anyway.”

Bad endings

Nothing lasts forever. Other than faith, people wear out, affection, desire, compassion, feelings of protection and devotion – all come to an end. For the blessed ones, the important attachments remain intact all through their lives. For others of us, patience can be outworn in small or large things. Respect can be lost. Affection can change. We can come to find that love is misplaced.

We come together with another in an intimate relationship to find comfort, and happiness, and maybe a home – or maybe just an adventure. How we begin a relationship has a lot to do with how it ends. There are always exceptions, but..

Pick up someone for their sexy or “hot” appearance or behavior or for a sexual opportunity – and that is what will keep you together. Let the “spark” of excitement, the drudgery of living, or an important (to your partner) aspect of your appearance or behavior change .. and *poof.* It becomes an equation of convenience, whether it is convenient enough for each party to stay together, for now, whether one or both move on. Yes, lady, you could get your hair “done” in a “fresher” style – and lose his attention, if his attention was won with that long, loose, tough-to-groom hair. Or stop using that expensive cologne that caught him, or those tight pants or high heels. Or, sir, you could indulge in watching your favorite team instead of paying attention to her – and show her she really doesn’t care that much about you when you aren’t “wooing” her.

Use gimmicks to “win” a partner, and that gimmick might be all that tends to hold things together.

Pick a guy for his resolve, his discipline, his moral strength and understanding of character – and you might just be able to build a home that will last your life.

To avoid the “bad ending” is simple. And tough. If you use character, respect, discipline, honor and honesty to “woo” a mate-prospect – you gotta keep up that gimmick – be worthy of his respect, of her compassion, every day. Mistakes happen – tempers flare – fix them before annoyances become loss of respect and love.

And learn to see your partner, not just look at them. One of the most tragic failings in American family life is how many of us have lost the ability to see when our partner is unhappy or distracted, how to understand what the issue is, and how to let our partner know our joys and frustrations so they have a chance to succeed, too.

Because, really, it isn’t about having a long-term relationship. It is about sharing lives. We succeed, or I fail.