“Should you scream louder?”
- Teaching Simplicity, Independence, Self-Awareness
Swami Rama of Bengal, India and of the Menninger Clinic wrote, “Parents should, instead of instructing children to keep quiet or to shut up, teach them how to be still and be aware of other dimensions of their life… When children, from the very beginning, start becoming aware of their internal states, they can become creative…in strengthening their memory and sharpening their faculty of decisiveness…the center of consciousness is within.” (Marriage, Parenthood and Enlightenment, 1977)
Guerilla Tip: Give kids chances each day to think, search, and decide.
- Teaching by Steps
The Chinese proverb says if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; if you teach him to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Easier said than done because, let’s be honest, it does take more effort to teach than to hand out fish. Yet as a parent, you already took on that job.
Guerilla Tip: If your goal is to raise self-managing adults, you have to teach adult skills—fishing, setting the table, whatever. Don’t be selfish with your time or your never-ending patience.
- Questioning Their Techniques
Whenever kids ask for something in an unreasonable fashion, question their technique and invite them to do the same.
Guerilla Tip: Tell you kids, “You might not be getting your way because you’re not screaming loud enough.”
That sends them into a psychotic state long enough for you to finish your soup. Watch them considering whether screaming louder might work as implied. Then thinking this one through before proceeding, and thinking is good. So challenge them.
Guerilla Tip: When driving in the car takes too long, kids will have the classic whine, “Are we there yet?” Answer either, “Almost, but let me pull over so you can walk the rest of the way,” or, “Yes, that’s why the car is still moving.”
- Ending Tantrums Before They Begin
Tantrums remind me of the way some family members beg for table scraps. Without comparing kids to those family members, watch only how their teachers respond. When you see either activity, look for the reward system the teachers are using, and avoid that system for yourself.
In both cases, the problem first begins with the teacher who rewards undesirable behavior—giving in to a tantrum or feeding scraps to pets directly from the table trains the uncivilized to repeat their techniques. Then it ends with the teacher who complains about the results: “He throws tantrums, what can we do?” “He begs for scraps, what can we do?” Makes me want to hold up a mirror and say, “Here is exactly who taught them and how!”
The Germans say that if you have a good friend, you don’t need a mirror. Let me be your mirror.
Guerilla Tip: Demonstrate that tantrums are not productive—ignore them.
One thing the author guarantees you: If you give in to a 15-minute tantrum today, you will directly generate a 20-minute session tomorrow. That part of parenting is not trial and error, so you do not get to be surprised if you are the one proving that tantrums are productive.
However, if a tantrum begins and you realize immediately that you were mistaken to say no, switch quickly to say yes. Only you will notice what happened. After 15 seconds of the scene, there is no turning back.
- Ending Tantrums After You Trained Them Well
What if tantrums are well established in your home and you truly want to end them? A Chinese proverb says the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago—the second best time is now.
Now, since you acted as personal trainer for the tantrums to begin with, you are probably the best one to undo your training, but you would need an absolute guerilla resolve to stop rewarding the tantrums.
Guerilla Tip: Giving in to tantrums produces more tantrums.
Start by telling your kids you have had it with the scenes and the drama. You will not tolerate even a single lapse in the future, and there will be consequences! On this point, there can be no moments of weakness.
If you should weaken, you will need to drop the pretense that you do not want tantrums—apparently you do. Tantrums are certainly a passionate area for expressing the power struggle and control issue. Here are questions to consider:
- Why is there a control issue in your family? Hint—you invited it.
- Is there an issue of who is in control? Hint—you are.
- Don’t minor issues belong to minors and major issues to parents? Hint—yes.
- Do you fight over minor issues you could let kids have control over? Hint—cede control as deserved over time.
- Are you giving off mixed signals that minors lead on major issues—safety, emergencies, health and critical household rules—a recipe for disaster? Hint—they do not. Invite minor input only after you make it clear that you will make all final decisions.
- Teaching Organically
Any storytelling or fairytale at bedtime is a chance to teach your kid to start reading. Start when your three year old knows a story by heart. To perform this trick, seat the kid on your lap or next to you, looking at the book and its pictures.
1. Put your finger or hers underneath an easy word she knows. Start with words like ‘day’ that read exactly the way they look, not words like ‘right’ or ‘once.’
2. Pause when you get to the word and wait for her to say the word. You are setting it up for success because you know that she already knows the next word.
3. Point to the word she just ‘read’ and repeat it, “Day, you just read ‘day.’ “ Even if she doesn’t say the word, you can still model it and say, “Day. We’re reading the word ‘day.’ “
Instead of your kids getting empty cheerleading and empty praise, they get to see their own success, deserving of praise, which you ensured would happen. They prove their own competence to themselves, a lesson much stronger than any outside force.
Guerilla Tip: Confidence and competence feed off each other.
- Forcing Kids to Take Responsibility
Walking home from a late dinner one night, I saw two teenagers fighting across the street. One was punching the other who was bent or crouched on the ground, and it looked like it was Daniel punching his best friend. He stopped when he looked up and recognized me, but neither of us said much then.
When he came home at midnight, there was no point in berating him, but there was no point in ignoring the cruelty either. “Sam is your best friend. Is that how you treat your friends?” He could figure out how he should treat his friends and who to hang out with all by himself. We have no real say in those areas. My goal was to get him to look at his actions from an outside perspective, under the harsh light of midnight, and to face the truth.
Guerilla Tip: Gently ask your kids to face the truth about how they deal with their own friends.
- Challenging the Assumptions that are Only Imagined
When we were both adults, my friend Danny S. of NY, NY called me for driving practice. Having a driver’s license, he did not need the practice for the road test, but for something internal.
One, he lived in Manhattan for years. Like many New Yorkers, he used the subway and buses with few opportunities to use his license, which he kept current. Two, there was some psychological history with his father that was at play with driving a car. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it had something to do with self-esteem and earning his father’s respect. For both reasons, he needed the practice, which he could get in the suburbs with me.
It was clear there was some ‘stuff’ going on when he drove. Although he handled the car as well as an average driver, not a beginner, he was consumed with worry. His main focus was on what the other drivers were thinking about his driving, as his comments showed.
So here we have a grown man with a legacy of some kind of negative thinking haunting him from how his father raised him. And we have an experienced driver obsessed with how his driving is seen on the road. Since Danny was assuming the worst about what ‘the other guy’ thought of him, I said let’s be explicit about what drivers say about other drivers. If most drivers are cursing us for the smallest mistakes, let’s do just that to them.
I began by modeling some disturbing judgments: “Where did that jerk learn to drive?” “That skinny thing’s a bad driver and a bad girl!” “If she thinks she can just signal and change lanes, she’s got another thing coming!” Of course, we were in stitches giving life to such arbitrary putdowns, but it helped to verbalize what Danny was projecting on other drivers—that he is such a bad driver he deserved to be cursed for it. Once this clutter was said out loud, it sounded pretty foolish, clearing the air for driving with less mental baggage.
Guerilla Tip: To resolve old ghosts, invoke them by name and dissipate their power. Time by itself does not always heal them.
Whether as parent, big brother or big sister, challenge the assumptions that are unspoken, especially if they are critical. Spell them out and look them over for a reality check. My brother Rachim uses a guiding thought from mentor Shirley B., hospice social worker of Inwood, NY: “The way out is through.”
Any issues of unresolved history readily roll downhill, from parent to kid, from boss to worker, from memories to the present day. They do not stay politely in the past. Ignoring them does not make them fade. In business, they say it rolls downhill, meaning don’t be surprised when your boss passes on complaints from above without filtering them.
When his father was in town next and Danny was as ready as he would be, we all went out to lunch in the Loser East Side. Without his father noticing, we switched drivers for one leg of the trip so his father could see his smooth driving. No surprise, Danny’s father hadn’t noticed who was driving, because he did not experience the driving as an issue—only Danny did.
- Other people are entitled to their opinion, including so much nonsense heard around the world.
Guerilla Tip: As parent or friend, if you hear “I wouldn’t want people to think that…,” say, “Hey, let people think. They can think what they like, and we can live our lives the way we think.”
