Category: psychology

My Advice, Don’t Follow my Advice

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“Try to find someone nice!” is the advice I give young uns. They won’t listen, and we know they won’t, because we know we didn’t. We had to get over our attraction to the naughty first. The naughty are just more fun and fascinating, and they’re mean. No matter how hard “they” try to redefine funny, mean is just funny, when it’s not directed at us of course. Their violations of social protocols and etiquette, aren’t just funny they’re relatively informative, in the sense that their exaggerations of the opposite teach us a lot about ourselves. Nice comes in very low on our mate-o-meter when we’re young. Nice usually comes after all the bad boys and girls beat us down.

“I don’t want to play games,” we scream, they scream, and we all scream for ice cream. “I hate the games people play, and I try to avoid drama.” Then why did you date them? We dated them, because even though they were jackballs to everyone else, they were actually pretty nice to us, for a time and in small doses, and that made us feel special. We also enjoyed the vicarious attachments people made with us when we were around the mean and naughty. After dating those who made us laugh so hard that we cried, and cried so hard we laughed, we eventually decided to go out with someone who did nothing more than say something nice to us while we were watching TV with them, someone who appeared to enjoy cleaning the living room with us, and preparing a barbecue for a family reunion. We found ourselves opting for the stability and sanity of the nice. Some might call that boring, and that’s fine with us after everything we’ve been through. My advice is to date the tumultuous types for all of the excitement and fun they bring, but make sure to break things off before you start hearing substantial calls for commitment.

Save Your Money, Man, Save Your Money   

Those wild, good times cost money too, and the good times never last as long as we think. It’s Oh-So-Good right now, and we have no reason to believe it won’t last.

Someone pays us, and we don’t deserve it. We earn it! We earn it every day, and in every way. We work as hard as we play, but there will come a day when that will fade away, and things will happen. Things always happen, that’s the thing about things. They slap us from so many different directions that some of them aren’t even listed on Google Maps. What happened?

Save your money man. Save for that day. “Save 10% of every paycheck,” they say. Others suggest we save the equivalent of three-months of our salary. Both those figures are low, far too low for me, but I’m a saver. Most people can’t, or won’t, save, and living the spartan lifestyle in the present just seems like a waste of life. Carpe diem, seize the day, and save until the end of the year. When we do the latter, and it’s “all good”, we blow it all. 10% and three-months salary is a decent compromise for them. “It’s just money,” they say, “and I would rather live a life of fun and adventure than have a nest egg. Plus, isn’t money the root of all evil?” It is, if you have it. When we don’t, we see it as the necessity it is, and we learn the definition of penniless powerlessness. We’ll also learn what it feels like to depend on others for everything, and dependency can be humiliating. It almost makes us feel like a child all over again. My advice, do everything you can now, when times are good, to avoid slipping into that spiral.    

We should’ve and could’ve spotted the spiral before it started to swirl. We know that now, and we see the pivot points now that could’ve changed it? If we had the foresight, we never would’ve gone left instead of right or right instead of left, at that crossroad.

Think about where we would be right now if we had some foresight? If I only applied for that job/promotion that I didn’t think I was qualified for, but I probably was. I mean look who ended up getting it. If I had older siblings, better parents, and I made more friends, or dated more often just think what I could be now. And college, college! If I paid more attention in college, my life would be oh-so different. We can’t stop thinking about how that person, equally qualified, landed our dream job or promotion, because they threw a relatively worthless degree in basket weaving at the “theys”. The best explanation I’ve heard for why this happens is that attaining that sheepskin displays perseverance.

Experience teaches us two things, college degrees don’t mean as much as we thought they did, and it’s better to have one than not. But, and there’s always a butt, how many of us would probably be in almost-the-exact-same-space we’re in right now, if we attained the golden ticket? How different are the lives of the college graduates in our peer group? Generally speaking, they got a job, and we got a job. Even with all that, there’s a super-secret part of us that thinks if we just paid more attention in Mr. Crippen’s Astronomy class, we could all be astrophysicists by now. It’s possible, of course, but it’s more likely that if our academic accomplishments landed us a job on the Starship Enterprise, we’d probably end up a red shirt sent to investigate the spiky colorful plants that shoot out deadly spores.

The Bonkers

Avoid “The Bonkers” if you can. Our parents introduced us to the Bonkers multiple times. The Bonkers were our parents’ friends, which pretty much means our parents were bonkers too, as opposites don’t always attract. Some of the times, people make friends because they share a worldview, and some of the times it’s happenstance, but commonalities often weave their way into friendships. The Bonkers have ideas about how the world works, and their ideas are always nuanced approaches that are subjective to their worldview, fascinating, and wrong. If my parents were bonkers-free, they would’ve stepped up on The Bonkers at some point and said, “Hold on, that, right there, is just insane. I know you’re not willing to die on that hill, but if the Chinese are correct in saying that every adult leaves a mark on a child, I don’t want that influencing my child.”  

The primary characteristic The Bonkers share is resentment. They have an explanation for why they didn’t achieve in the shadow of their boogeymen. They were the child who didn’t get enough attention, who became an adult that was cheated out of the system for a reason so bizarre they feel compelled to repeat that reality-shattering explanation at every outing. In reality, they didn’t have the talent, ingenuity, wherewithal or perseverance to make the big bucks, and they spent their lives characterizing, and re-characterizing, those who do. I met their boogeymen more than once, and I knew some of them. When I unmasked them, I learned they weren’t the boogeymen of The Bonkers’ resentful narratives. They didn’t have near the money, power, or influence detailed in The Bonkers’ tales, and they didn’t make calculated moves to hold the little guy down. They were just as insecure, normal, and common as the people telling their tales. To move these findings from slightly funny to hilarious, I learned that most boogeymen have their own boogeymen. 

One of the best little tidbits I’ve ever heard came from a total wreck of a person. She said, “You raise a child to a certain point, and no one knows  where that ends, but at another point you learn to stop raising them and start guiding them.”

Another friend of mine dropped this nugget, “The number one rule to parenting is to spend time with your children and be there for them. The best element of my dad’s inept parenting was that he always made time for me. He made so many missteps and unforgettable mistakes, but he was always there for me. You’re going to make mistakes with your kid, we all do, but if you spend time with them, it will edit and delete some, if not all, of your mistakes.” Time, in other words, heals all wounds. 

How much time do we have for them? How much time do we have in general? Most narcissists are so into “me time” that they should’ve entered that data into their reproduction algorithm before going down that hole. Is it more narcissistic to require more “me time” or more time? We don’t even know the definition of narcissism, but we’re all narcissists and none of us are. “Yeah, you’re talking about that other guy.” 

I’m a storyteller, and I tell stories the way others play chess. I appreciate the fact that readers want a streamlined point of focus, but I cannot help considering the other side. When someone provides me a story from their day, I immediately think about the other side. (For those who want friends in life, don’t do this. People don’t like this. They want you to side with them in their story.) Learned, intellectual types suggest that it’s impossible for us to be objective, this is what learned, intellectual types call hyperbole. Of course total objectivity is difficult to difficult to achieve, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to achieve it. Some don’t, and when I hear their stories, I can’t help but think about this situation from the other person’s perspective.  

When we tell our story, it’s filled with faults and variables. We’ve all had primrose paths and well-marked minefields on the map of our crossroads, and most of us chose the well-marked, yet uncharted minefields. When we detail for our children the ramifications and consequences of our actions, we conclude with, “But I know you’re not going to listen to me, because I didn’t listen to my dad. Your best scenario is to experience everything yourself, then remember what I said here today. If you learn to couple your experiences with my advice, as I did with my dad’s, you might turn out halfway decent.” He listens to me now, at this age. That will change, of course, but our job is not to build the structure, it’s to create a foundation from which they build.

There’s Always Someone Better 

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“No matter how good you think you are there’s always going to be someone better. There’s always going to be someone tougher, smarter, faster, and better than you are. No matter what you do in life, there will always be someone, somewhere who’s better.” –Jack T. O’Connor

“What then?” Thomas Sowell.

The Tom Cruise movie messed us up in a lot of ways. The Cruise character was “the best there ever was” in just about every picture he starred in, and the hair and the confident, gleaming smile led us to believe it was probably true. We got the sense that all these Tom Cruise characters had to do was throw their hat in the ring, and they’d be better than the 99% of us who try and cry about it later. The conflict of his movies usually involves him trying to beat the one insolent fella who claims, usually with a snarl and belligerent attitude, that he is just as good as the chosen one. Tom Cruise beats him with that smile and without one of his hairs moving into an improper position. Mingled in Cruise’s tangible superiorities, are relatable intangibles that make us think we, too, could do whatever he’s doing without even trying. We then walk out of the theater thinking if we’re not going to be the best at something, why do it?

I had a tumultuous relationship Tom Cruise movies for many years, until I decided to just sit back and enjoy them for what they are. They’re all enjoyable, action-packed, and fun, but the inherent prodigy, “chosen one” themes have always bothered me. I prefer to think that he who works harder receives the reward. We all know that life doesn’t always work out that way. We’ve all met someone who doesn’t even have to try very hard to beat us, and the only thing we can do is stew in their shadow. It’s always difficult to come to terms with that, and it’s even more difficult to come to the conclusion that we’re not one of them. We’ve all heard the line, hard work has it’s own rewards, but when we have to work so hard to achieve what almost comes natural to others, the reward is almost bittersweet. The question the unnaturals should ask soon after they realize that they’re not a prodigy, a golden child, or the best there ever was, is what then? What are we going to do about it?

“Well, if I can’t be the best at it why do it?” is that annoying answer that keeps coming back at us when he hear the Tom Cruise movie say it, either implicitly or explicitly. If we follow this line of thought, and we leave a profession, craft, or past time that has a prodigy we’ll never outdo, we’ll run into another blessed with more talent and/or experience in the next.

We don’t want to work hard. We don’t want to work so hard that we leave blood, sweat, and tears on the cutting room floor to get it. We might do it, but that’s not what we want to do. We want to be blessed by God with such natural talent that others envy us. It’s why we love Tom Cruise movies, and superheroes. We see this when our kids try to pull the proverbial sword from the stone, and we remember how frustrating it was to learn that we were never going to be prodigy. No one marvels at hard work. No one wants to see a Dirk Nowitzki work out or Freddie Freeman take batting practice. No one cares about the little things they do to be the best, and we don’t care how hard they try. We want to be the finished product. We want natural speed, the ability to hit a baseball a mile without any coaching or practice. It’s humbling to learn that we’re just like everyone else, and that if we want it bad enough we’ll have to put in the same 10,000 hours as everyone else. We don’t want to make the humiliating and embarrassing mistakes we almost have to make to learn. We want to be the prodigies who can beat our opponent with one hand tied behind our back. We don’t mind trying to get better today, but we better be the “the best there ever was” tomorrow. To paraphrase The Who song, “You better, you better, you best.”

There’s something inherent in the human experience that prevents us from ever conceding that it will never be us. Even after our prime working years are over, and our days of athletic conquest have long-since passed, we think about how it could’ve been if we did a little of this and a little of that. Humbling experiences did lead us to put in our 10,000 hours on some pursuit, and we did incrementally improve our lot, but we kept running into prodigies who didn’t even have to put in a tenth of the blood, sweat, and tears we did. We admire natural ability as much as we loathe it, and the back and forth  is probably how we developed a love/hate relationship with prototypical Tom Cruise movie.

The Unnatural

I was a short, skinny kid with little-to-no muscular definition in 8th grade. With those physical detriments, I never dominated on the field, but I was quick. I wasn’t fast, as most kids could beat me in the 50 yard dash. In the space of ten yards, however, I had no peers. When harnessed, this talent proved surprisingly effective in soccer, until I met the doofus. I was the second shortest kid in my grade and the skinniest by about 20lbs. The doofus was one of the .0001% of the population who was actually shorter and scrawnier than I was. I was rarely confident, and never over-confident on the field, until I saw that this kid was going to be my toe-to-toe competition for the day. I thought I was going to have a glorious day.

I don’t remember how many times that kid ended up beating me, but let’s just say that it was an embarrassingly high number. Let’s say it was seven times. If it was seven times, it was seven times in a row. This kid wasn’t quicker than me, and his knowledge of the granular techniques of soccer was something, but it wasn’t everything. Yet, this kid always seemed to make the perfect move against me, and his ability to beat me exposed all of my comparable deficits. The reason this kid sticks in my head, all these decades later, is that he proved, over and over, what it meant to simply want it more.

This kid beat me down so thoroughly for that first half that I was sure my coach would be subbing me out. I learned this would not be the case when he said, “I will not be subbing you out.”

The implicit message was that I was going to have to find a way to adjust if I didn’t want to roast in the humiliation of total and unqualified personal defeat. It was a given, by the second half, that I had no chance against this scrawny, little nerd in toe-toe combat, so I just had to factor that into my game. I began running down the sidelines with him. I gave up some precious real estate on the field by doing so, but I followed him, waiting for him to mess up, and I planned to capitalize on any tiny slip-ups he made. He made very few no slip-ups, but my new strategy caused him to run out of real estate most of the time. He tried to kick the ball through me, and it usually bounced off me out of bounds for a throw-in or corner kick. I began nullifying this kid’s superiority, almost by accident.

The final story wasn’t a Rocky or Rudy story in which the lesser finds a glorious way to bring down his personal, miniature-sized Goliath. He continued to steal the ball from me and fake me out in all the humiliating ways he did in the first half, but I nullified him as a force on his team, until our toe-to-toe competition was basically a wash. He nullified me as well as I nullified him, which was a moral victory for me after my disastrous first-half. Even though he scored the only three goals for his team in the first half, he wouldn’t score again, and my team won the game. There was no glory waiting for me on the sidelines, after the game, as this kid continued to dominate me throughout the game, but he didn’t score again. I found a way to look my teammates in the eye when the game was over.

It’s nearly impossible, in any walk of life, to avoid comparing yourself to others to gauge for how we’re doing, and I’m a far better philosopher than practitioner in this regard, but I say don’t get mad, get better. We’re all going to run into brick walls in life, called “the best”, no matter what we do, and the first thing we have to grapple with is the fact that we’re not the best, and we probably will never be. Once we’re done knowing that, and kicking the wall, we need to figure out how to get better. Don’t get mad, get better.

My miniature Goliath and I had a lot to work through. We were both too small and too skinny. If he got tossed around as much as I did, he had an understandable excuse for never wanting to play another sport again. He, obviously, asked himself the “How do I get better?” and he probably didn’t find the answer or an answer, but he had answers every time the ball was between us.

There are always going to be people who are better, and I think one of the reasons we scream and writhe around on the ground is that we expected to be better at this by now. We expected that we would begin our lives as a prodigy, golden child by now. We haven’t done the work necessary to get better, but something should’ve come along by now. This kid isn’t bigger or better, but he beats me every time. It just seems unfair that some are better at sports than we are, and it is when we encounter a prodigy who was born with certain attributes we can’t possibly overcome, but most of the times toe-to-toe competitions are won by those who want it so bad that they’re willing to do whatever they have to to win.

Bret and Greg

Bret Maher was “the best we ever saw” in training class. We all knew his type, and we all know that they flourish in training classes. He was the type who everyone watches. If we were going one-on-one with him, in our soccer days, no one paid attention to us, his opponent, or credited us with a stop. They either deemed the confrontation a Bret success or a Bret failure. Bret was that guy who had all the answers in training class. When he didn’t, it led to witty banter with the instructor. If he was right, that was “just Bret” the most annoying two words in the English language for those of us who attended the two-week training seminar. Yet, when we finally made it out onto the floor, and he experienced the daily grind of the work, Bret was indifferent to bored, and he quickly found employment elsewhere. Either he found out he couldn’t be the best there ever was, or he didn’t think it mattered to everyone else that he was. Whatever the case, the job bored him, and he decided to take his talents elsewhere.

At his funeral, one of his best friends gave a thunderous tribute to a man named Greg Gunderson, “If he decided to become an astrophysicist on Monday, he’d probably be one of the best astrophysicists in the country by Thursday. If you think that’s a gross exaggeration, all I can tell you is you didn’t know Greg.”

“From the minute I met him, I just knew he wouldn’t be the type to live to sixty.” another friend said in a more casual moment, outside the funeral proceeding. “It’s hard to describe, but when he died, it wasn’t really sad. I tried to be sad, because I was so close to him, and I thought he was a real sweetheart, but if you got to know him as well as I did, you knew how unhappy he really was. So, when he died, it was almost like what took so long?”

The prodigious, young Greg Gunderson managed to match his athletic achievements with academic achievements, who proved to be just as successful as an adult, ended up drinking himself to death. How could someone to whom so much was given, seek the comfort of the bottle so often that he killed himself? Some of his friends alluded to the idea that it had something to do with the divorce, but other friends, those who claimed to know him best, said Greg and his wife both realized he just wasn’t cut out for marriage, and his serial philandering proved it. His wife wasn’t even bitter about it in the end, because she had dealt with it for so long. Greg didn’t appear mired in misery about it either. The two seemed to just accept his failure as something he either wouldn’t or couldn’t change, and their divorce, and the subsequent handling of child visitation, was surprisingly congenial. His closest friends were always quick to rule the divorce out on those grounds, so why then?

“Greg Gunderson was just a miserable person,” one of his friends said, “who couldn’t find anything that made him happy.”

“From the minute you met Greg, you just knew he wouldn’t be the type to live to sixty.” another friend said. “It’s hard to describe, but when he died, it wasn’t really sad. I tried to be sad, because I was so close to him, and I thought he was a sweetheart, but if you got to know him as well as I did, you knew how unhappy he really was. So, when he died, it was almost like what took so long?”

None of Greg’s really good friends addressed the questions we had, such as how could a golden child, prodigy with such a gregarious personality be so unhappy? I didn’t know Greg as well as these guys did, but I did get the sense that beneath the personality was an unhappy person. The one comprehensive answer I arrived at is that the human being is such a complex animal with different needs and wants that it’s almost impossible to develop a rule of thumb when it comes to trying to understand another fully. Some of us are a soup who want and/or need limited ingredients, some of us are a stew that call for a couple more ingredients, and others are a mishmash of gumbo or jambalaya wants and needs. There are no mandatory ingredients to a gumbo or jambalaya, but we know something is missing, we just can’t put our finger on what.

Greg’s friends said he didn’t talk about it much, and my guess is he didn’t think about it enough to source the hole in his soul. He just medicated his mysterious misery, and anyone who has ever tried to  medicate their misery knows that it works, in the short-term. It can make us funny, fun, and laughable, until the next morning when we realize we’re worse, and the situation we tried to medicate is worse, because we put it off for another day.

No one could put their finger on what was missing in the delicate balance of ingredients of Greg Gunderson’s internal jambalaya. My guess is it called for a greater sense of satisfaction. We have to know some misery to ultimately know happiness, and we have to know the abject misery of failure to receive some satisfaction for our eventual successes. Greg Gunderson tripped up in life, but those momentary lapses were made on the path to accomplishments. He never, that I know of, knew the type of abject failure that causes one to want to quit with the notion that if I can’t be the best at something why do it? We have to know failure to know success, and if all Greg ever knew was success in his formative years, he probably didn’t experience much satisfaction from it. He probably expected it.

“All he ever knew was success,” his best friend said at his funeral. “He was a star athlete in high school, graduated college with honors, and he was always one of the best employees in his field.”

When they say all he ever knew was success, however, it seems like a bifurcation of the word knew. Prodigies, like Greg, know success at all levels, but do they know it like we do? Satisfaction, we could say, in lieu of Greg Gunderson, is reserved for those of us who work so hard for something that we leave blood, sweat and tears on the cutting room floor trying to get it. When we finally accomplish our goal, we know glory intimately, because we worked so hard to get there.

Ten Rules of Parenting

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You’re a parent, congratulations and my condolences. It might be hard to picture now, if your kids are little more than screaming sacks of flesh but you will eventually be glad you had them. When that prospect becomes a reality, it’s a life-altering event to realize that someone is going to be dependent on us for everything for life, and for life. We’ve never had someone dependent on us for everything before, and we’ve all heard someone talk about that dependency, but we’re never prepared for it when it hits home. It’s a shocking revelation that occurs in phases and layers. The first layer of dependency involves money, food, shelter, and all of the superficial needs that humans require to survive. Those needs can be hard to fulfill, depending on the situation, but compared to the other, deeper layers of need, the superficial ones are cake. If you are a scared first-time parent, this formerly frightened, first-time parent of nearly ten years, offers ten rules to working through those layers.

Don’t Die

This first rule of quality parenting is a result of experience-based wisdom, because I survived, and I am a better parent for it. Neither of my parents followed this rule, but my step-dad did. He decided to not die of a massive heart attack one day, and he did that long enough to correct most of the errors he made as a parent. The explanations, descriptions, examples, illustrations and testimonials of why a parent should live has filled other books, but let’s just say that if my step-dad died as a result of that massive heart attack, I might be more wrecked than I already am. In the decade that followed that massive heart attack, and his eventual demise, my step-dad went from being a step-father to a dad. He was a flawed human being, but he taught me things that inspired this list.

Spend Time with Them

The second rule of quality parenting might be more important than the first, but if you’re dead, spending time with your kids will prove more difficult. Those of us who lived long enough to see it know that the steps involved in raising, training, refining, and redefining a small human into a halfway decent person requires a boatload of time. It’s also fraught with failure. First-time parents should know that they will fail, loudly, and often. If you don’t see this now you will, you will. If you want to correct the record now before that day of personal reckoning arrives, there is a cure. The best and worst model we have for parenting is our parents. “I might not be the best parent in the world, but I am light years better than my dad,” might be a refrain you tell yourself, and you may captain your ship in such a way that you don’t repeat his errors, but you’ll make others, and when you do, expect to hear time-honored laughter from your father, “It’s not as easy as you thought is it?” Quality parents will try to correct their errors, of course, but those corrections will be as flawed as we are. The best way to make a difficult situation better is to spend so much time around your kids that they’ll eventually weave our mistakes and flaws in with our admirable efforts and qualities that they mix them together in an big old soup bowl of memories. I normally despise new age terms like being present, but there is a huge difference between being in the same room with them and living in the present tense with them, and we cannot achieve the latter with a device-colored nose. I saw an illustrative example of this when I went to a friend’s house, and I saw my grade-school friend chatting it up with his parents. My friend and his siblings weren’t talking about awful grades, discipline, or sports, they were talking about stuff, interesting, uninteresting, and funny and funny stuff, and their parents were listening. There were no raised voices, neither party required the other to take them more seriously, and there were no clever, demeaning jokes about the other. Those parents knew things about their kids, and I’m not talking about the important things either. They knew about the stupid things their kids liked, and they appeared to enjoy talking about those things with them. They had what we call a relationship, a relationship that was outside what I considered the normal parent-child framework. I wasn’t jealous, because I didn’t really want a relationship with my step-father, but being among normal kids discussing normal matters with their parents did make me feel like a stranger in a strange land, and they accomplished that simple feat by spending massive amounts of time with one another. It was weird. 

Be a Hypocrite

“Do everything you can to make his youth last as long as possible,” someone told me when my son was too young for that advice to apply. I didn’t know what that meant at first. How do I make their years of youth last longer? We’ve all heard that phrase, and we all know and don’t know what everyone is talking about.  What do kids, preteens, and teenagers prize more than anything else? That’s easy: Fun. Next question, what’s their definition of fun? We, as parents, will always be the primary influence on them, but friends provide their primary definition of fun, and that changes with age, sometimes dramatically. We might not even know about the progressive changes in his definition of fun as he ages, but it can change them and bring about a premature close to their naive, carefree youth. After a certain age, the only role, influence, or power a parent has in the arena of fun is adversarial. Our job, as their parent, is to sniff such situations out, slam the door on them, and take all the slings and arrows that follow.  “They’re going to do it anyway,” my friends’ parents said when we were teens. “I’d prefer that they do it around me, where I can keep an eye on them.” I had some great times in those cool parents’ homes and under those rules, and my definition of fun changed dramatically. I went from thinking that all I had to do was throw a ball around to have fun, to needing a beer, a girl, and whatever substance I could find to further explore the definition of fun. Now that I’m an old man, I no longer see those progressions as inevitable, and when I think about how damaging those inevitable progressions were to me, I cringe. Those years of innocent, naive youth could’ve lasted a lot longer if I made different friends in high school, and those kids had better parents. I heard my friends’ parents further justify their actions by saying, “We can’t tell them not to do it, because we did it. What kind of hypocrites would we be if we didn’t allow them to do it?” Wait a second here, how did you make this about you? It’s not about you anymore, and I’ve even heard you acknowledge that on different topics, but you make this decision based on you? If we take a step back and analyze that now, age-old excuse for not being a better parent, we could view our fear that someone, somewhere might see us as a hypocrite, as somewhat narcissistic. In lieu of the carnage I inflicted on my youth, as a result of these justifications, I now challenge other parents to be more hypocritical for their kid’s sake. “Call me a hypocrite, because that’s what I am,” we should say to our kids. “Give me the badge, or scarlet letter ‘H’, and I will wear it proudly. You might thank me one day when you’re old enough to appreciate what I’m doing here and why, or you won’t. I don’t give a bit! We can talk about the things I did at your age, and I will detail for you why I don’t want you to do them. I’m not going to allow you to do the stupid things I did to wreck my life and end my youth far too early.” I don’t know if the ‘they’re going to do it anyway’ message started in the movies, daytime talk shows, or if it simply passed down from generation to generation, but some parents I know suggest that they’re willing to permit their children to do the dumbest things, under their roof, with the hope that they never hear their children call them a hypocrite. “Why do you care if they call you names?” I asked one of them. “You did it too!” they say, reminding me of what we all did together, and they say that with all sorts of exclamation points and index fingers pointed at me, as if I haven’t examined my life properly. “I did,” I say, “and I know how it wrecked me. Why would I stand back and allow him to wreck himself in the same way?” “Well, he’s going to do it anyway,” she said. I could’ve asked her how she knows that, or I could’ve said no he won’t, but the truth is she doesn’t know, and either do I. I do know that I’m not going to concede to that supposed inevitability to such a degree that I permit him to do it in my home, with the fear that he might one day call me a name, like hypocrite.

Respect Your Authority

You provide the definition of authority in your child’s life, and they will hold onto that definition of authority for the rest of their lives. I didn’t think any of my bosses knew what they were talking about, until they proved otherwise. Was this a reflection of how I viewed my step-dad, or was I just an overly skeptical person? Someone suggested that a child’s definition of an ultimate authority figure in life, reflects their definition of God. If they viewed their dad as the ultimate authority figure in their lives, and that dad was a mean, unforgiving man, chances are the kid will view God in the same manner. If their dad was loving and kind, they will view God in the same manner, generally speaking. So, if a parent wants to see how their children view them, they might want to ask their child how they view God. It’s an interesting theory, whether 100% true or not, and it is a nice addendum to the idea that you provide them the definition of an ultimate authority figure.

Needless to say, these are formative years for your child, and what they believe at six-years-old will have a profound effect on what they think when they’re thirty-six. This is why I dismiss those who view my definition of authority as ego-driven. I see it as the opposite. I see it as my job to provide my child with a level of consistency that will hopefully lead to a sense of clarity. He experiences confusion now, and he will experience inconsistency and confusion throughout his chase of happiness and success, but if he has a, “I know what my parents would do in this situation, and I know what they would think” base, it could help him make better decisions.

Thus, when he experiences confusion, I see it as my job to help him end that, and I try to answer him with as much objectivity as I can. My kid knows this particular answer so well that he repeats it with me whenever he has a question, “Some people believe this … Some people believe that, and I believe this …” I then back my answer up with as many facts and opinions as I know, and I try to provide as much information about “the other opinions” as I do mine. I try to answer his questions comprehensively and with as much objectivity as I possibly can, because I do not want someone else to tell him things he’s never heard before. I approach these questions from the perspective that other people don’t care about him as much as I do, and they will tell him the other, negative things for their own purposes. I try to tell him about all things beautiful and wonderful, but I also want him to know about the ugly and awful, and I want him to hear it from me first before some less responsible person tells him about it.

If you’re one who puts a focus on the beautiful and the wonderful, and you shield them from the awful, because they’re kids, and they don’t need to hear that mess. They’ll learn it from someone, somewhere. They’ll then consider that purveyor of the awful a cool truth-teller who treated them like an adult, and you’ll never be able to recover your role in that arena. 

I also try to keep it concise enough to adhere to the constraints of his attention span. (The latter can be challenging at times.) One of the simple keys to success and happiness, I’ve given him, is to try to enjoy being around people as much as they enjoy being around you.

One of the numerous challenges to your authority will be excuses. Excuses work, because we love and care for our child, and we know that they have challenges. One of the primary challenges in their life is, of course, grades. One thing we hear in our home is, “Well Jerry and Judy got worse grades than I did. Jerry got a 60%, and Judy got a 45%. I know this is hard to believe, but I actually got one of the best grades in the class.” This, of course, is the time-honored excuse for bad grades, and the time-honored response is, “I don’t care about Jerry or Judy, or anyone else in the class.” I’ve repeated that line a number of times, but I put an end to that excuse with one heart-felt response once, when I repeated that line, but added the addendum, “I only care about you. You might live your whole life and never run across someone who cares about you as much as I do.” I meant all that, and I looked him in the eye when I said it, and he held my gaze as I said it. He saw how true it was to me, and he hasn’t tried to drop that meaningless excuse on me again. “She always had my back,” a friend of mine said at his mother’s funeral. “Even when I was wrong, she took my side.” He was right, of course, and I saw it on numerous occasions. His mom was as loyal to he and his sister as any parent I’ve witnessed, but by always taking their side without qualification, she failed to hold them accountable for their actions. It led the two of them to commit numerous criminal and self-destructive acts, and they were only held to account for their actions a few times. The only damage they received, in my opinion, was to their character. As one who has yet to manage the arena of excuses, the only thing I can add here is it takes a deft hand to learn how to manage their excuses and their challenges, because we can’t accept or refuse to accept excuses with a broad brush, for that would be a reflection on us, but we also don’t want them to use excuses as a crutch for not adhering to guiding principles or performing to the best of their ability.

As a child of an older parent, who spent most of his life as a bachelor, my dad wasn’t exactly honed in on parenting. As long as I didn’t embarrass him in front of other parents, teachers, or any other authority figures by doing something awful, I was on my own. My friends envied me for that, and I loved it for a while, but I began to view my step-dad’s laissez faire style of parenting as him not caring as much as my friends’ parents did.

Get Old

If it’s too late for you to get old, physically and mentally, because you’ve already had the kid, I suggest you try getting old spiritually. What’s the difference between old parents and young? We can answer that question with another question, what’s the difference between parents and grandparents? Older people, in general, have more of a ‘been there, done that’ mentality that suggests they no longer have that unquenchable need to do ‘it’ so often that they become ‘it’. Older people, generally speaking, are satisfied, settled, and they tend to be happier. Older parents and grandparents give young kids more time and attention. They actually listen to the nonsense that comes out of a kid’s mouth, and they interact with them on a level younger parents rarely do. Older parents also don’t resent this new ball of flesh and bones standing before them asking stupid questions and taking up so much of their time and limiting their freedom with such nonsense. If we boil all of the elements of parenting together, the big difference between older parents and younger ones is resentment. Younger parents love their children from beginning to end, and they probably love their child as much as any older parent can or will, or it’s so relative to the person that it’s often tough to suggest that one is better than the other. The younger parent still has an almost incurable itch to do things, see things, hang out with their friends, and pursue their career to its fullest extent, and they can perceive that child as inhibiting them from enjoying their younger years as much as they could. If I had a child as a young adult, my guess is that resentment would’ve influenced my relationship with them. How much of an influence would it have had? Impossible to know, but I still had a lot of youth to get out before I got old. Having a child as an older man was perfect for me, because I already had most of that out of my system by the time he arrived. So, my advice is to get old before you have a child, and if that’s not possible, get old mentally and spiritually. 

It’s Not about You Anymore

This fourth rule of parenting is more of a mindset than anything else. Your life’s not over of course, but if you’re going to try to be a decent parent, you should at least concede that it’s not all about you anymore. “It was never about me,” a parent said. “My parents never paid attention to me, my whole life, and I turned out just fine.” The very idea that you would say such a thing tells me that even if your parents didn’t pay attention to you someone else did. Someone felt so sorry for you that they filled the gap. They showered you with sympathy, because your parents didn’t pay enough attention to you, and you now want us to feed your sympathy fix? We’re talking about devoting attention to your kids, and you want us to pay more attention to you? My first response to someone who offers me such a figure eight is, ‘So, due to the fact that your parents did nothing for you, you’re going to compound that error by doing nothing for your kids?’ Before I say that, however, I realize that as confused as I am by such a reply, I’m probably not half as confused as the person who gives it. If it’s possible, I suggest we try to stop the narcissism and realize that in the grand scheme of your life, it’s not about you anymore.

Do no harm

“My actions aren’t harming the kids,” one parent said. I’m going to make an outrageous, bold, and opinion-based (as opposed to fact-based) statement that just about everything we do affects our children. They might not be paying attention to us, and they might not react to what we do, but some of the whims we have to be something other than a good parent have a collateral damage effect that might not be apparent on day one or week one, but like those old dot-matrix selfies we used to make of ourselves in the 70’s, the tiny, insignificant things we do, could end up forming a relatively dysfunctional child over time.

Read, Listen to, and Talk about Parenting

The very idea that you’ve read this far suggests that you’re probably a good parent. The idea that you’re open to considering another person’s ideas on parenting, no matter who they are, suggests that you’re interested in learning, developing, and eventually becoming a better parent today than you were yesterday. Being interested in others’ ideas suggests that you’re trying, and you’re probably already doing a relatively good job as a parent.

Become Wise

The difference between intelligence and wisdom is the that latter involves learning from experience. Our grades in school suggest that if we had any intelligence in our youth, we rarely applied it, and some of the moronic decisions we made after school suggests that our scores haven’t improved much. The eighth rule of parenting suggests that if we learn anything from our past, and we’re able to pass that along, we’re imparting wisdom. Parents are the beacon in their darkness. They’re as confused about the way the world works as we were at their age, so they ask us questions, and we answer, and they learn the ways of the world from us. Your kid is not an online message board for all of your ideas. Be careful and as thorough as possible with the ideas that you plant in their head. It’s almost impossible to be objective, and some say it’s impossible. We all have knowledge, ideas, and positions that are subjected to us and our upbringing. If it’s near-impossible-to-impossible, why try? If we don’t make some effort to teach them in the most objective manner we can, they might end up making all of the same mistakes we did.

Keep it Simple Stupid

The ninth rule of quality parenting leans on the eighth in that our kids view the world through our lens. They will learn from teachers, their friends, other family members, and they’ll learn various nuggets of information from too many people to list, but we are their primary influence. If we’re doing it right, every piece of knowledge they learn will pass through you, both positively and negatively. “Don’t underestimate them,” was the piece of advice a three-time parent told me when I became a first-timer. I valued that advice for a time, until I realized that a better course of action might be to underestimate them and let them surprise us. If we underestimate them, we keep it simple. This is not to suggest that we dumb it down for them, but that we exhibit some patience for the gradual time frames it takes a young human to learn. I’ve heard social commentators talk about the learning process that animals go through. “How long does it take a horse to learn how to walk after it falls out of the womb?” they ask. “How long does it take for a young chimp to learn what it needs to know? It takes the human being eighteen years, sometimes longer, to be able to competently exist in the adult world of their species.” I considered that a humorous profundity, initially, until I compared what those other species’ need to learn and what a young human needs to learn to compete among their peers. If we choose to underestimate them, they will surprise us with their knowledge, and when they drop those big questions on us it could be a hint that they’re ready. That’s when we leap to action. I prefaced my answer to one of these big questions about the reproduction process with a word of caution. “I’m going to launch, until you tell me to stop, and I want you to stop me when this becomes too much for you.” He did tell me to stop, and he added, with a pained expression, that he thought he probably waited too long. “Ok, when you’re ready for more, don’t go to your friends, or any other adult. You come to me.” Another element to keeping it simple is to try to avoid introducing our confusion into their thoughts. The confusion involves fact versus opinion and all of the variable truths we know that underly our definition of fact. We might think we’re helping them achieve some of the advanced intelligence it took us decades to achieve. Depending on their age, of course, they’re still trying to grapple with how one plus one equals two in math, and we’re trying to teach them our advanced knowledge on human interaction. There are all sorts of exceptions to the keep it simple rule, of course, as we need to test them and push them if we want to help them learn and advance, but if we allow them to dictate the pace of their learning, we might increase their retention level tenfold.

Lie to Your Kids

When one of my friends got pregnant, she was glowing internally and externally. One of the beautiful, wonderful things she whispered to her newborn was, “I will never lie to you.” The thing with beautiful and wonderful whispers is that they often turn out to be flawed. There’s nothing wrong with being honest with your children, but there’s honest and there’s brutally honest. There are some circumstances when the truth has diminishing returns. Example: Your daughter is a strong, independent woman who has strong ties to her flawed father, your ex-husband. She has become a relatively successful woman, and a well-rounded adult that other people enjoy being around, and although it grates on you, you know that 50% of her admirable qualities are due to her strong relationship with him. So, the next time she swerves into some sort of character assessment of your ex-, you’re going to drop the bomb on her. You think she finally deserves to know the truth about the man she reveres. If you view this in an objective manner, you’ll know that it does nothing for her to learn the truth, but you think she’s been in the dark for too long, and you think she’s old enough now to know the truth about him. Stop right there, before we go another further, does she love him, and will she love him forever, and does she need him, and will she need him forever? Will he make her so happy for the rest of her life that your testimony might actually do more harm than good? Are you going to drop this bomb on her for her own good, or yours? We all have competitive instincts in any given situation, and this is a situation in which our loved one does not know that we were the “good guy” all along, because we’ve been fudging the truth to her for so long for her benefit, and to promote the good relationship she had with him. These competitive instincts kick in when she constantly reminds you that she sees your messy, spiritually devastating divorce as an amicable one, and she’s done this for far too long in your estimation. She deserves to know the truth, you say to yourself, or do you want vindication, validation, and all of the terms you could loosely define as synonyms of narcissism? You tell her. You drop the bomb on her, and the bomb, and all of its shrapnel has a devastating effect on her. Now she won’t talk to him, and the other day she said something along the lines of “Why didn’t you tell me all this sooner? It feels like my whole life has been based on a lie.” And she now has a hole in her soul that’s as deep as yours that threatens to eventually mirror your wound, but you got all of the validation and vindication you wanted, as she now sees her dad as a father, and a bad guy. Congratulations, and my condolences. Some of the times the truth has diminishing returns. I write the latter, because I met a woman who would never disparage her ex-husband to her daughter, even though he wasn’t a good guy, and he was largely an uninvolved parent who was ambivalent to her existence for much of her maturation, and her daughter forgot almost all of that. The daughter apparently doesn’t remember examples of his negative attributes or characteristics, and her mother would never do anything to spark those memories. The mother considers her daughter’s uninformed relationship with her father as beneficial to the daughter, even when, EVEN WHEN, the daughter’s faulty memory has proven falsely detrimental to the mother. The daughter will also never have an epiphany on subject, and the mother has vowed to never remind her. “I think I’m going to nominate you for parent of the year,” I told this mother. “I know I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t put up with it. Especially when she ignorantly claims you were the one at fault. I would eventually break after one of her ignorant little comments, and I think there might be some infinitesimal nugget below 100% that wouldn’t eventually break. I don’t know how you do it.” She said something about doing it for her daughter, even though the daughter won’t speak to her, has rejected her mom almost completely, and she shows no signs of ever reversing her stance.

Bore Them with Consistent, Quality Parenting

“Parenting is one of the most difficult jobs in the world,” people will tell you.

“Really?” I say now, ten years in. “I really enjoy it.” There are times when it’s frustrating, confusing, and time-consuming, but I really like being a dad. I enjoy spending time with him. I like being there for him, and I love letting him know that I’m one of the few people he’ll ever meet who genuinely and comprehensively cares about what happens to him without conditions. He might take all that for granted now, but I have firsthand knowledge that taking a parent for granted is one of the best backhanded compliments he can ever give me. He knows I’ll always be on the sidelines, figuratively and literally, cheering him on. He knows I’ll always be there for him no matter what, and right now that bores him so much that he doesn’t want to talk about it.

If you are a first-time parent, and you’ve heard that it’s the most rewarding job in the world, it’s not. It’s not, if you’re seeking immediate rewards. That kid will probably avoid rewarding you with any forms of gratitude, compliments, or outward displays of love. And if you ever complain about that, someone will probably say something that is impossible to define like, “Parenting is its own reward.” I still don’t know what that means, but it might have something to do with the idea that you’ll always be there for them, as the consistent beacon in a world of confusing darkness, and you’ll always be “so you that I can’t imagine you doing what you said you’ve done.” If you do it right you’ll be so boring that you might become the one thing, the only thing, they can count on life.