“You’re hurting my ears.”
- Guerilla Tip: Pick low-hanging fruit.
They are easiest to reach, taste the same as any, give a fast sense of accomplishment and would only get in the way of reaching the rest. A German saying: He who likes cherries soon learns to climb.
There is an exception to the rule of picking low-hanging fruit. Start on the hardest part of a project where mistakes cannot be covered, like chiseling a stone sculpture. In painting with watercolors, it pays to start with a key area and to work from light colors to dark. Since colors are transparent, mistakes are only repaired with a darker color.
Guerilla Tip: In projects where mistakes are hard to cover, start on the hardest part first. If you mess up badly, you can restart with less time and effort lost than if you left it for last and then messed up.
Diplomats, all seasoned negotiators, take two different approaches with the hard-to-reach golden apple of solving a sensitive issue. Usually they work their way up from the low-hanging fruit. With those issues settled, everyone feels accomplished, warmed up to the other side and ready to go out on a limb.
Occasionally, diplomats start at the most sensitive issue. Once they reach consensus on it, other issues are all easy picking. And without the prizewinner, the rest of the crop may be worth little.
- “Hold them close, then let them go,” is the parenting theme of clinical psychologist Haim Ginott.
Guerilla Tip: Relating to the arc of the years of development requires ever-changing renewal on your part.
As the years pass starting at one, you will be holding them close less and less, while letting them go more and more. As following this motto will garner you the best of both worlds, show your kids lots of love but don’t crush them.
Think of holding a bird in your hands and being gentle, patient and trusting. Although you may want the bird to stay forever, you surely know that the tighter you hold, the more desperate you make it want to fly off and never return.
Zen Master Langya said, “Think of how trees let birds flock then fly off, without asking for their arrival nor aching for their return when they depart. Keep your heart like the trees, and you will find your own grounding.”
Guerilla Tip: If you stay one step ahead, you can shower them with love without either confining or controlling.
When Daniel was one year old, I planted tulips throughout October and November, keeping him securely strapped into a harness on my chest or my back, warm inside my jacket. It made me think of the closeness babies must feel when they are carried around all day long in a papoose.
My time with my kids was priceless, but I did not make the moments overly precious by judging every activity through the fashionable lens of quality time. Instead, it was perfectly normal for me to prune a crabapple tree while the kids were catching fireflies in jars. The scene does not qualify as quality time, but it is family time nonetheless, and memories are made of little moments.
While I had precious little time with my kids, still, when they asked to go off to a birthday party, I said that was fine. What was I going to do, say no to a birthday party?
- To get things going in your home, or to overhaul an ineffective household, you need a system. Not my system, but your very own system.
Kids ask for the same bedtime story because the repeating pattern is comforting to them. Give them comfort, too, in the form of your predictable system. Then reshape your system artfully over the years as circumstances change and kids mature.
Guerilla Tip: A system of house rules is a whole plan. If rules change when you are tired, that is not a system, but a mess.
I love you for it, because you are as human as the next. However, your kids will take advantage of it.
They will do so not because they are greedy and self-serving, although I would be hard pressed to disagree with you if it appears that way. The bigger picture is that kids will rebel against absentee parenting. They will generate consequences for you to face for your inaction. Get real and take charge.
Guerilla Tip: Lead poorly if you must, but lead, and when you goof, refine your system.
First admit that you are in charge, please. Tell them so. Apologize when you mishandle something, but never apologize for being in charge. Focus your apology on the tone, “I want to say I’m sorry I snapped at you,” but back up the content if you can.
If you need to, check your lease or mortgage papers. Whoever signed is at least one of the folks in charge. Whoever did not sign, because minors cannot legally sign a binding agreement, is definitely not in charge.
- Setting Imaginative Boundaries
Create your own household rather than recreating someone else’s family. If you stay within the bounds of responsibility and respect, or if you extend those bounds for reasons you trust, you can arrange things as you like. Anything inside a thought-out system can be good, anything falling outside the plan needs scrutiny. Any consistent way you want to arrange things is fine if you think it through. You are free to inspire your kids, but never to cause any harm you cannot repair. There’s no wrong way, and don’t be scared off by conventional wisdom, whatever that is, that argues against your system.
Guerilla Tip: Advocate for the unconventional idea. Convention can be a simplifying and comforting rule of order, but it no longer needs an advocate.
Setting boundaries for your kids creates constraints for them. If well chosen, the constraints express love. Far from a constraint for you, setting your boundaries means playing with parenting, and the sky’s the limit. Have a blast. If you have your head in the stars and your feet on the ground, you have the best of both worlds: the spontaneous balanced with the practical, adventurer paired with CEO, warrior and priest, hunter and gatherer, English speaker out in the world and Hungarian speaker to your great-grandmother.
- One year, I worked as a restaurant manager and sometimes filled in as a waiter. Occasionally, customers who knew me in my profession as a technical writer asked if it felt like a comedown to wait on tables. I compared it to being a host, not a servant. To be at someone’s service, graciously entertaining guests, is an enjoyable role and does not put you beneath them.
Guerilla Tip: Serving warmly is not servile. To serve our kids’ needs with tenderness is not to be their servant.
Pre-Columbian Mexicans believed even your grandchild is your beloved noble descendant, a jewel, a precious feather. Then again, bonding with a grandchild could be a matter of uniting against a common enemy. Note that the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice, which supplemented an otherwise low-protein diet, a whole new spin on serving warmly with tenderness.
- Scenario One: You have no system yet, you have a baby—You are very lucky to start fresh.
The new parent gets more advice on what to do than anyone else does. My technique was to graciously thank folks for their ideas, mentally trash them—the advice, that is—then end the day by picking through the trash for those few bits I could keep and try.
Guerilla Tip: When you get advice, this included, treat it like any other gift you receive. After you say thank you politely, you are free at any time to use it or toss it away.
Practice expressing yourself generously with love and with rules. Hold her a lot and pass her around freely—under your watchful eye, of course. Kids of six or eight feel very proud when you can set them up safely in an armchair with the baby in their arms and say, “Good job. She’s comfortable with you!”
Guerilla Tip: When a baby yells out, instead of telling her no, start by asking, “What’s hurting you, honey, because you’re hurting my ears!”
“What’s hurting you, honey” is the love and compassion to find out what is really the problem. As you explore the cause of the crying, you are soothing her with your reassuring voice. “You’re hurtin’ my ears” is the start of a rule, “When you hurt my ears, I stop listening …” Of course you know with a baby you won’t get results on the spot, you are rehearsing for saving your hearing in the coming years.
Then when is the right time to start toughening kids up to face the tough world out there? You cannot always be there for them, to make nice, but toughness can still wait.
Guerilla Tip: If you ask a one-year-old to self-soothe, you might as well ask the kid to arrange for college tuition or at least change his own wet diaper.
A kid too young to dress himself at all or toilet himself at all can begin learning to comfort himself? How do they do that? What about feeding himself? As long as you are helping at mealtimes you need to help soothe him at feel-bad times. Parents and non-parents all know that while different cries can mean different things, it is not always possible to get to a crying kid. But that is different from actively deciding to ignore a kid calling out for help.
Then there are the times of teething or fever when we hold and hold a kid and still provide very little comfort, but we are present.
Guerilla Tip: Being present shows that you may not be all-powerful, but will be nearby with loyalty and will not give up easily.
Besides, since a newborn has only one form of communication, crying, why would you ever want to train him that his cries will often fall on deaf ears? Occasionally, yes, but often?
Guerilla Tip: You must choose. Your actions with a newborn will demonstrate either that this world is basically safe to rely on for our needs to be met or that it is basically not.
Either the people around us are basically reliable and trustworthy, with exceptions, or they are not, with exceptions.
The Buddha said, “A single candle can light a thousand and not shorten its own life. Happiness never decreases because you share it.”
- Scenario Two: You have no system, you have a challenge—A challenge can still be fixed, one step at a time. When you come up with each new idea, tell the kids that Mommy got new ears and her new ears don’t like to hear any shouting.
Guerilla Tip: If your current system needs improvement, you have the luxury of taking some time to make it all better. Even the rest of your life.
The good news is that all is not lost if you see you created your own mess—or challenge—because if you were strong enough to break it, you are strong enough to fix it. This simple formulation will help you start over, and extreme makeovers are now all the rage.
On the other hand, if someone else made the mess, this book would make the perfect gift for them. In the meantime, tell the kids that there’s news.
Guerilla Tip: If the kids got a new Mommy, the kids have new rules to learn and follow, but you’ll be patient while they learn. However, this new Mommy and her new ears don’t like to hear any shouting.
If it is new to you, here is the posture to try on to get them ready to listen and laugh. Finding your own voice and using your own words, convey the following message:
- It is my business to make you want to listen. Since you will hear me speak to you with respect, you will want to listen. There is no forcing involved. We can have fun with it. You’ll see.
- If, instead, you don’t listen, there will be consequences. Don’t wait for me to say, ‘Forgive me, but I may not have made myself clear you are over the line, which you are.’ You won’t hear me saying it. You will see the consequences.
- Work back from the results you want.
Guerilla Tip: To start a new rule, begin by deciding what results you want, big or small, like no shouting without an emergency, and then generate consequences for the kids to face for their actions.
Good consequences for good actions and the little unpleasant sting of a mosquito bite for bad actions. They will get it. Disregard what is right and what is wrong in the larger sense, compared with what will be effective for your kid in your circumstance.
Guerilla Tip: Make sure you do not punish or set consequences for some divine sense of justice in the world, but only those that will result directly in a change in future behavior.
Any other use of consequences is unnecessary and weakens your position. Furthermore, why would any one human have charge of the justice in the world? Do you see that job as vacant?
If you are lost, sometimes all you have to say is, “There will be consequences.” Let them use their imagination, and you can then decide later what the consequences will amount to. You will get plenty of chances to improve your new skills.
What will they get for shouting? I liked Time Out—coming up next.
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