Predictably Happy Kids

As parents, we are supposed to do what is best for our kids. One of the biggest choices we all need to make is how to develop our kids when they too young to choose for themselves. Obviously, without being able to see into their future, this could be a case of the blind leading the blind.

But maybe it does not have to be.

In the past few days, I have been reading an excellent book called Predictably Irrational by Professor Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at MIT. In one of the chapters, he describes experiments that show humans are so sensitive to loss they do everything they can to avoid losing even things they could have, but do not actually have. One of these things, he says, is options.

In his description, he give parents’ decision-making about their children’s development as an example of how irrationally expensive it is to keep our kids’ options open. If you do the math, he says, you see that spreading the family resources over 4 different activities each week, say ballet, piano, art and karate, means your child makes 1 unit of progress in each of them every week, as opposed to choosing just one activity, say piano, which would allow the child to make 4 units of progress every week and become really good at it.

I was tempted to agree, and this post was almost about how much his point made sense, but then Eden and I went for our morning walk (it is so great she starts late on Wednesdays) and reviewed her life, the lives of Tsoof and Noff and those of other kids we know, and my view of this issue changed completely.

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How to Manage Difficult People Using "Why?" and "What?"

Difficult behavior is always a sign that there is an unfulfilled need. Most of the time, everybody focuses on the desires the difficult people express and not on their needs, while the difficult people are so stuck on what they want that they are not at all in a position to fulfill their own needs.

That can be changed by you helping them find what they need and by helping them get it.

The following technique was developed by observing 2- and 3-year-old kids. At the age of 2, they start with the question phase. Here is a typical discussion I have had with my own children and many kids I have worked with.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a card game?”

“What’s a card game?”

“It’s a pack of cards with things printed on them that we use to play a matching game”.

“What’s a matching game?”

“It’s a game where you have two cards that look exactly the same and you have to find them out of all the cards”.

“Why do we have to play a matching game?”

“It’s good for our brain. We learn to recognize things that are the same and others that are different”.

“Why is it good for our brain?”

And this conversation can go on forever if I could manage answering questions forever. The trick is always to answer calmly. It is a game, a very healthy game, and children learn a lot from it. You could say that this type of questioning is difficult behavior, but I think it is your reaction that makes it a learning experience or a difficult behavior. If you answer calmly, it is a learning experience. If you answer with anger, it becomes a difficult behavior.

This post is part 8 of 9 in the series How to Manage Difficult People

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Quality Time: How to Have Fun with Your Kids

Now that you know what quality time is and what quality time is not, what can you actually do with your own kids? Here are some great things you can do to have more quality time with your children and help them feel loved and close to you.

Ask open questions

Whenever you meet your kids after school and work, show interest in their day. Do not confuse asking questions with interrogating – one comes from curiosity and the other one from a need to control. So pay attention to the tone of your voice and to your intention and ask to hear the child’s answer. If you expect some “correct” answer, it is not quality time and your child will not trust you next time to answer your question. Instead, gently explore with your child his or her impressions, reasons and feelings.

Tip: when you ask a child “How was your day?” the answer is typically in the form of a rating, e.g. “Good”. To avoid this dead end, rephrase the question as “Tell me about your day” or “What happened to you at school today?”

This post is part 2 of 2 in the series Love Languages

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Wonders of Creation

Are your kids the most precious, amazing and wonderful things in the world?

If you are not sure, keep reading.

Parents, like most people, often view the world in absolute terms – “This is pretty”, “This is wrong”, “This smells good” or “How rude!” Naturally, the way they view their children is similar. They break each child down into separate properties, such as looks, math skills, strength and manners, and assign a rating or a score to each one of these important aspects in each child.

The result is disappointing more often than not, simply because nobody is perfect in every way, let alone kids, who undergo big changes and have not mastered every rule in their parents’ book. This is particularly apparent during the teenage years, when even calm and obedient children turn into full-sized, defiant and opinionated creatures. Many parents of teenagers are so focused on what their sons and daughters are not doing (right) they have a hard time remembering how they behaved last year, when they were still in primary school.

But your kids are the most precious, amazing and wonderful things in the world.

Really.

First, consider the odds of any of them being born at all. Out of thousands of potential partners in your life, you have chosen only one to have each child with. That child would not be the same if you had chosen anybody else.

Out of hundreds of eggs and billions of sperm, only one sperm combined with one egg to produce each child. The odds of having that particular child with those particular physical traits and basic character make winning the lottery seem like a sure thing.

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How to Manage Difficult People: Helping a Difficult Person

As you have seen in the previous post, every difficult behavior can be mapped to an unfulfilled need that the “difficult person” cannot find other ways to fulfill. Each need is a strong belief that they must have something, they cannot live without it and they can only get it by “being difficult”.

Now that you understand the missing feeling that difficult people are searching for, you are probably asking yourself, “What do I do to give it to them?”

One of the biggest challenges of helping and supporting difficult people is the fear that giving them what they want will make them think their obnoxious behavior is a good strategy of getting what they want and it will only make things worse. I have heard this claim millions of times when working with children – “If a child is behaving in a bad way and you give him what he wants, he learns that this is a legitimate way to get what he wants”.

Well, that is not the case.

Focus on needs, not desires

There is a big difference between giving children what they say they want and giving them what they need. Much like difficult people, children do not know that they behave the way the do to fulfill a need. If they knew, they would give themselves that thing without the difficult behavior.

If you focus on giving them what they need, then after a while, when the need is fulfilled, they will calm down and ease their demands. I am not saying, “Give them what they want”, I am saying, “Give them what they really need”. Give them what they are missing, because they do not know how to give it to themselves and may not even know what it is.

This post is part 7 of 9 in the series How to Manage Difficult People

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Quality Time: The Gift of Your Presence

Love, as you know, is the most important thing you can give your children. Although you may not have any doubts about your love for your children, they often do. If you want to understand their doubt, think of your own doubts about your parents’ love for you.

Now, when I am a parent myself, I have no doubts about my parents love for me, but when I was a child, I had many doubts. It took me a long time to learn that what they called “love” was not my definition of love and I translated their behavior into “They don’t love me”.

In my parenting workshops and coaching sessions, many parents share the same feelings with me. There are things you discover about your parents’ love for you only when you have your own kids and when you get the opportunity to learn about “love languages”.

The great book “The Five Love Languages” by Gary Chapman describes 5 different ways to express and receive love:

– Words of affirmation
– Gifts
– Physical touch
– Acts of service
– Quality time

This post and the next one are about Quality Time, because Quality time is very tricky for parents in this day and age.

This post is part 1 of 2 in the series Love Languages

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Me Too

Kids go through many periods as they grow up, including the “What?” period, the “Why?” period and the “No!” period. Each one of them serves a purpose and, if the parents go through it well, the children develops another healthy part of their character and understand the world a bit better. But the “Me too” period seems to last all the way through childhood, adolescence and sometimes never ends…

From the parents’ perspective, “Me too” can be very annoying, because kids sometimes ask for really inappropriate things, but for children learn about the world by observing and mimicking others, so there is nothing more natural and healthy than wanting what the others have or trying to do what the others are doing.

In our family, 10-year-old Noff is much younger than Tsoof (16) and Eden (23), so when she wants something they have, they used to get upset, until they got used to it.

When she was little, we often tried to respect her choice of food, so we asked her what she wanted to eat, gave her some options and helped her prepare the food she liked. But often, when she sat at the table, she saw that Eden had something else to eat and seemed to be enjoying it very much. Noff would promptly forget she ever wanted anything else and ask Eden to share.

“Eden, can I have some mango too”, she would say.

“But you said you wanted cereal”, Eden would complain, “I brought enough mango for me, because you wanted something else”.

“Yes, but now I want mango too”, Noff explained, as if that was the most obvious an innocent thing in the world. And for her, it was.

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How to Manage Difficult People: What They Really Need

Let’s say you are willing to make the effort to manage the difficult people in your life and help them get the feeling they are missing, the feeling that causes them to behave the way they do. How can you tell what is the feeling they really need?

Needs are a complex issue. They are feelings that are so strong that you believe you cannot live without them. Each person’s needs are very individual, but they definitely get them out of control. If you can control a need, it is no longer a need but more of a preference.

Many people confuse wishes, desires, preferences, values and needs. Although they all have something in common, they differ in intensity.

If you have a discussion or an interaction with a difficult person and you feel their demands are a bit too strong and that they are having a little panic about their request, ask them, “What will happen if you don’t get it?” or “What will happen if things don’t happen the way you want them?” or “What’s the worst thing that can happen?”

This question creates a loop in their brain and the answer does not matter. Their subconscious will answer itself and lower the difficult person’s tension from “I absolutely must have it” to “OK, well, I won’t die without it, so maybe it’s not the end of the world after all”.

This post is part 6 of 9 in the series How to Manage Difficult People

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Let’s Work Together

Working in a group is an important skill for everyone and it is not something you are born with but need to develop. Teamwork is not always easy, because not every member of the group is the same, particularly when some people seem to do nothing at all.

I am sure it happened to you that you had to submit something in a group and the level of frustration rose very high. I can sure tell you it happened to me during my studies. If you are a good student, it is probably even more frustrating that you have to form a group and do something together and some only appear on the last day to add their name to your work. My frustrations were not very long, though, because I remembered how hard it was to be on the side that cannot contribute, so when I was leading a project, I was much more tolerant and accepting.

During my studies, I had the honor of working in a very special project called “Creative Thinking” that was led by Professor Gideon Carmi and taught physics to students in Grade 1 and Grade 2. Professor Carmi’s philosophy involved co-teaching, so we taught in teams of two, one educator and one who was not. That was the first time I discovered the real advantage of working and learning in a group.

These 4 years of amazing experience thought me that just everyone not being the same could be a huge advantage. When working by myself, I was limited to my own abilities and talents, my own point of views and my own thinking paths. When I worked with another person, we had a wider range of skills and talents at our disposal, different ways of thinking and better solutions to problems. In fact, the bigger the group was, the more successful we were.

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Honesty

Personal integrity and honesty are very important to me. One of the strongest values my dad managed to pass on to me is the truth. Numerous times during my childhood, I saw him sacrifice acceptance and even money in order to follow what he believed to be true and real. He also repeated that lesson to me often.

While growing up, however, I found out this was not the case with everyone. There were many situations in which I knew the truth and witnessed people denying it or acting as if the opposite was the case.

When I talked to my mom about it, she told me, “Sometimes, people don’t exactly lie, but they tell a ‘white lie’ to avoid complications or embarrassment”. The world, it turned out, was not a courtroom drama, where it was “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.

In fact, it seems that lies have been institutionalized and you cannot get very far without them anymore.

Some time ago, I attended what I thought would be a series of presentations on building great websites, but turned out to be a series of presentations on various topics, including personal philosophy, business, training and other things. One particular presentation was called “Do not lie” and it made me revisit the issue of living honestly from an adult and even a parent perspective.

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Quality Time: How to Have Fun with Your Kids

Wonders of Creation

Quality Time: The Gift of Your Presence

Me Too

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