Category Archives: Family

How to Blog

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One of the most important things I learned in the blogging webinar I recently participated in is that people don’t read blogs for good writing, they read them for help with specific things. So one day this week I wrote ten tentative “How to” type post titles that readers might find helpful. Lots are parenting and or teaching related. Look for me to start weaving some “How to” posts into the mix soon, starting with “How to Get Your Child to Talk About What’s Happening in School” on Wednesday, December 7th. Also know that for every “How to” post I publish there are several others I need someone to write for me. Here’s a sample:

• How to Get Your Children to Eat an Occasional Fruit or Veggie

• How To Get Your Child To Clean Up After Herself

• How to Free Your Children from The Grip of America’s Next Top Model

• The Secret to Raising Boys

• How to Sass-Proof Your Teen

• How to Get Your Child To Unplug From Facebook

• How To Turn Your Kids onto Non-fiction

• How To Get Your Child to Turn Off a Light In an Unoccupied Part of the House

• How to Teach Your Child To Turn Off the Shower

• How to Get Your Children to Wash a Car

• How to Get Your Children to Walk or Ride Their Bikes to School

• How to Get Your Teen to Sound Out Words Before Breakfast

Another worthwhile thing I learned is that posts shouldn’t exceed 600 words. My long ones tend towards 650 so I’m going to trim even more. Given my serious surplus of words here, it’s an especially good time to thank everyone for reading and sometimes commenting this year. And here’s a four-part 2012 favor. If you enjoy this blog, please bookmark it, forward a link to friends, comment sometime, and consider subscribing via email.

334 words. Can I carry the 266 over or is it a “use em’ or lose em'” thingy?

Coping With Narcissists

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Is it just me or is it seemingly impossible to get along with narcissists? Of course if you caught my betrothed after one of our spats, she’d say I’m a self-centered sad sack.

I’m three-quarters the way through Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs and I can’t help but make connections between it and Whybrow’s American Mania.

Don’t know if I’ve ever been so conflicted about one person. There are at least three Steve Jobs—1) the counter-cultural Zen Buddhist, exquisite designer, artist-philosopher, modern Stoic, vegan; 2) the focused, driven, scarily perfectionist, extremely mercurial, control-freak, business genius; and 3) the sometimes cruel, heartless, empathy impaired human being.

Readers of the bio are probably most interested in Jobs 2, but I find the human nature/human being story far more interesting.

I need to finish the book and think some more about it before reconciling my schizophrenic thoughts. For now I can say Jobs 3, the uncaring, mean, empathy impaired knucklehead often repulses me. Which brings to mind Whybrow’s insights on empathy. He writes, “. . . the experience of intimacy and the stability of the attachments one has in early years ultimately shape our capacity to understand the feelings of others. Human empathy is largely a learned behavior, much as is language. . .”

So we’re not hardwired to care about others? Whybrow says empathic understanding results from “social anchors” or a “. . . wellspring of healthy families and the nurturance of supportive, economically viable communities. . .” In other words, immerse young children in caring families, schools, religious and civic organizations and they will follow the caring adults’ lead and end up empathetic young adults.

Could the fact that Jobs was adopted have compromised the stability of his attachments so much that he never “learned empathy” in the way he learned English? I wouldn’t think so because he was months old when adopted and his adopted parents were stable, supportive, and loving.

After deciding not to marry Jobs, one of the two women he was closest to in his life found a psychiatric manual, read about Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and concluded that Jobs embodied all of the symptoms. (Here’s hoping Betrothed never stumbles upon that.) She said, “It fits so well and explained so much of what we had strugled with, that I realized expecting him to be nicer or less self-centered was like expecting a blind man to see.” “I think the issue is empathy,” she added, “the capacity for empathy is lacking.”

I’m clueless as to the root causes of Jobs’s lack of empathy, but the larger, more important takeaway is that empathy is learned. Whybrow convincingly argues that empathy results from a “wellspring of healthy families and nurturance of supportive, economically viable communities.” Sadly, some families aren’t sufficiently healthy, nurturing, supportive, or economically stable enough to pass on empathetic understanding to the young in their charge.

If expecting narcissists to someday be nicer or less self-centered is like expecting blind people to someday see, the best way to cope with them is to stop expecting them to return personal interest and care with similar curiosity and kindness. Far easier said then done.

Narcissus admiring himself shortly before his first triathlon

Think Legacy not Longevity

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I think it was my ten year high school reunion somewhere in Orange County, California where I reconnected with one of my best friends from the 6th or 7th grade. At the start of junior high we were tight. I learned to ski on trips to Big Bear with his family and I spent a memorable week backpacking with them in the Sierras. He was a stud, a good running back and hurdler who gave both up for surfing and partying which he also excelled at. In high school, I was his designated driver.

Must have been the drugs, because at 28, he was pretty whacked out. Despite not looking especially healthy, he pigeoned-holed me and was going on and on about living to something like 125. I should have humored him and told him I was really looking forward to our 100th reunion. Pills; 1,000 calories a day; filtered carrot juice, can’t remember all the bullshit stuff he thought would get him to triple digits.

Granted, my childhood friend is more extreme than normal, but most of us don’t like thinking about dying. Many people spend lots of energy trying to delay it as long as possible.

In hindsight, I wish I had encouraged him to think legacy not longevity. It’s not the length of our lives, but the quality of them. Whether 40, 60, or 80, do you leave your world—whether it’s your family, the places you worked, the physical environment, or your community—better off?

I have to credit Peter Whybrow, author of American Mania, for this reminder. This sentence of his stopped me dead in my tracks. Pun intended:

In a collective denial of aging. . .we employ all available technologies to simulate youth, misunderstanding that the secret to immortality lies not in the individual but in the society we leave behind.

I can’t express it any more clearly than that.

Tight-Knit Extended Families Require Vision

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There are only three types of families: 1) physically distant ones; 2) physically close, but emotionally distant ones; and 3) physically and emotionally close ones.

I realized this while sitting next to a man my age from Egan, Minnesota at a college swim meet recently. He was watching his son—along with his wife, brother, daughter, parents, and in-laws—a good freestyler at the University of Wisconsin LaCrosse. We talked swimming, college decision making, and Gopher football. The state cross-country meet was taking place on campus at the same time, so the GalPal and I had to take a shuttle bus to the pool from an overflow parking lot on the periphery of campus. The bus was filled with three generations of family cheerleaders too.

Physically distant families have to drive or fly for several hours to see one another. According to one writer I’ve recently read, in the U.S. at least, this family type predominates in urban centers on both the East and West coasts. My family is this type—mother and in-laws in two different states, aunt and uncle in a third, siblings in a fourth and fifth, cousins and nephews in a couple of others. Physically distant families may enjoy one another’s company, but they don’t see one another with enough regularity to truly know one another which compromises closeness.

Physically close, but emotionally distant families live within a few minutes or hours of each other, but they don’t get together with any regularity due to unresolved conflicts and/or prioritizing work and material pursuits. Despite their proximity, everyone mostly prioritizes their own nuclear families in the same manner as physically distant ones.

Physically and emotionally close families not only live within a few minutes or hours of each other, but they prioritize getting together weekly or monthly. Minnesota may have a disproportionate number of tight-knit extended families.

Modern Family, the outstanding sitcom about a physically and emotionally close family is atypical because most families today are spread out over long distances. Which probably explains the show’s appeal. Viewers enjoy inserting themselves into that physically and emotionally close family not just because the writers make them funnier than our own family members, but because they’re an affectionate and loving community of mutual amusement and support.

My dad, like most post WWII execs, always took the promotions he received even when they required him to criss-cross the country. I wouldn’t have traded for anyone’s dad, but by choosing successively better jobs that paid more money, he sacrificed a physically and therefore emotionally close family because my siblings and I followed suit, deciding where to live based upon work opportunities, personal preferences, and other things besides physically proximity to one another.

Another variable in some physically distant families is eighteen year olds going away to college. Second Born, next in line in our fam, wants to go “out of state”. When asked why recently, she initially Rick Perryed (couldn’t answer), and then finally said, “The weather.” What are the odds of me having the first teen in the history of the world to base a life decision on weather patterns? Our family, like every other one, is a subculture. She’s simply following the lead of her parents, her cousins, and her older sissy. What would be surprising is if she wanted to stay close to home.

I plan on being more intentional than my dad about prioritizing family closeness. I can’t control where my daughters go to college, take jobs, or end up living, and I can’t control the fact that twenty percent of Americans move every year, but I’m hoping that living in one community for a record-length of time increases the odds of them settling down somewhere close. This is the only home they know. We are Pacific Northwesterners.

If all goes well, ten or twenty years from now, I’ll be just one of an extended family of crazies cheering wildly for a grandchild at a pool or piano recital somewhere nearby.

I Am the 1%

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Not based on my five figure salary, my Kirkland Signature wardrobe, my penchant for water at restaurants, or my municipal golf courses of choice.

I am the “one percent” based upon health, meaningful work, beautiful surroundings, good friends, and a loving family.

Turning fiddy in a few months. My peers are showing varying degrees of wear and tear. Their setbacks help me appreciate how fortunate I am to be able to afford healthy food, to have time to exercise daily, to have access to quality medical care, and to feel younger than I am.

My work matters. How fortunate to get paid to help young people write, teach, and think through what they believe and how they want to live their adult lives. And remarkably, every seven years I get the ultimate gift, time to press pause and read, think, write, rest, renew.

Half the year I get to cycle in unbelievably beautiful mountain settings, swim in an idyllic next-door lake, and run on wooded trails and sleepy residential streets. In the summer it’s almost never hot or humid and there are no bugs that would prevent one from eating outside. There are no hurricanes and hardly any lightening, but I reserve the right to amend this post if I someday survive the overdue Shake.

I often climb the mountains, swim the lake, and run the trails with excellent friends. Fitness fellowship.

My extended family is a blessing. My wife and daughters especially so. Apart from one very bad leg, they’re healthy and happy. My Better Half and I just returned from visiting First Born at Leafy Midwest Liberal Arts College. Most nineteen year-old college students would be semi-embarrassed by visiting parents, but for some reasons ours was off-the-charts warm, inviting, and appreciative the whole time. Even invited her Spanish teaching mom to her Spanish class and took us to great student a cappella and modern dance concerts.

When we first arrived on campus, Spanish teaching mom went to meet her at the Language Building. I read in the “Libe”. At the appointed time I headed across campus to meet up with them. Turned a corner and there she was walking by herself to a piano lesson. Cue the killer off-the-ground hug.

We stayed in a room in this house which a woman left to the college with an unusual condition—that it always be available as a student hang out with the necessary ingredients to bake cookies.

Home Base

The suggested donation for staying there was $30/night. We had twin beds in a smallish room. The first hints of winter crept in through the window next to my bed. I could whizz while simultaneously brushing my teeth in the tiny bathroom.

But looks can be deceiving. No one would suspect that inside this humble house, in one of the modest rooms, a One Percenter slept contentedly.

Marriage Red Flag

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My nomination for a SLP personal finance journalism award—given to the author of a particularly succinct, lucid, and provocative personal finance article. From Rachel Emma Silverman in the Wall Street Journal (10/17/11):

If you care too much about money, your marriage may suffer.

A new study by scholars at Brigham Young University and Provo, Utah and William Paterson University, Wayne, N.J.. looked at more than 1,700 married couples across the U.S. to determine how their attitudes toward money affected their marriages.

Couples who said money wasn’t important to them scored about 10% to 15% better on measures of relationship quality, such as marriage stability, than couples where both or one spouse were materialistic.

Also, couples in which both partners said they valued lots of money—about 20% of the couples in the study—fared worse than couples who were mismatched and just had one materialist in the marriage.

“Couples where both spouses are materialistic were worse off on nearly every measure we looked at,” says Jason Carroll, a BYU professor of family life and lead author of the study. “There is a pervasive pattern in the data of eroding communication, poor conflict resolution and low responsiveness to each other.”

In the study, published recently in the Journal of Couple & Relationship Therapy, participants completed a questionnaire which evaluated their relationship and asked, among other things, how much they value “having money and lots of things.”

Dr. Carroll says the research team had expected that disparate couples, those with different ways of viewing money, would have worse relationships. They found, though, that it was “materialism itself that’s creating much of the difficulty,” even when couples have plenty of money, he says.

Materialism might cause spouses to make poor financial decisions, such as overspending and running up debt, which can strain relationships. What’s more, materialistic spouses may pay less attention to their relationships and give their marriage lower priority than other concerns.

In other words, marry someone who values “having money and lots of things” at your own risk.

Fraud Antennae

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By comparison, we’re a very strange family. We almost never talk to and never text with Away At College Daught (AACD). We Skype on Sunday nights. Typically, six days without any contact. I understand if you want to tar and feather us.

So it was quite surprising when AACD called mid-morning, mid-week recently. Someone had just called her from her bank and said they needed her debit card number because they were having problems with their network. She gave it to the caller. And immediately realized she’d been duped. Her mom told her to immediately call the bank and everything would be okay. She did and it was, but her experience begs an important question. How do we form meaningful trusting relationships with others while simultaneously guarding against criminally inclined people looking to take advantage of us? More succinctly, how do we develop fraud antennae? The more desperate people’s economic lives become, the more critical it is we develop fraud-detection skills and sensibilities.

I told AACD’s younger sissy the debit card story as a precautionary tale and explained to her surprise that there are people in the world who wake up every morning trying to figure out better ways to steal elderly people’s life savings.

Bernie Madoff, besides offering regular 20% returns, was supposed to be pretty charming. Nicholas Cosmo probably was too. A minnow compared to Madoff, Cosmo only defrauded 4,000 investors out of $195m. Or consider David Dutcher’s experience. Here’s a teaser to get you to read the entire LA Times article:

David Dutcher met Sharon on Match.com in late 2008, a few months after separating from his wife. “We had a lot in common,” he recalled. Sharon loved four-wheel-drive trucks and sports. They met for coffee, then dinner. Sharon was tall, slender, blond and beautiful. She moaned that she had not had sex in a long time. She told him he had large, strong hands and wondered if that portended other things. She described his kisses as “yummy.” “It felt a lot like Christmas,” said Dutcher, 49, a tall, burly engineer with wavy red hair. The women fiddled with Dutcher’s tie and massaged his neck and shoulders. The brunet unbuttoned her blouse to reveal generous cleavage. “I am way over my head with these girls,” he remembered thinking. “I hadn’t been out dating in a while.”

Apparently Dutcher’s Christmases are different than mine, but I digress. “Sharon” had been hired by Dutcher’s ex-wife. The night ended much worse than Dutcher imagined—with his arrest for driving under the influence by a cop working with Sharon and Dutcher’s ex. The age-old honey trap* with some crooked soccer moms and cops thrown in for good measure.

The crooked uniformed cop, an admittedly extreme example of fraud, brings to mind the uniformed Norwegian killer who every adult on the island somewhat understandably, albeit tragically, assumed was legit.

Dutcher simply needed to stop staring at the cleavage long enough to ask himself if what he was experiencing was so far out of the ordinary that maybe he had been set up. This is what I’m going to call the “so far out of the ordinary/too good to be true test” and maybe that’s the answer to my question. Then again, a lot of very smart and successful people didn’t think that Madoff’s promised 20% investment returns in a wildly fluctuating, but mostly down market were too good to be true so how can I expect D-squared to have applied the test?

More importantly, how do we guard against more subtle attempts at fraud, like the stream of fake emails or phone calls seeking debit card numbers? And how do we teach young people to form meaningful trusting relationships with others while simultaneously guarding against criminally inclined people looking to take advantage of them?

Experience is the best teacher. AACD is less naive as a result of that phone call, panic, and quick trip to the bank. But what kind of curriculum, dinner conversations, and other resources might help young people be proactive in detecting and thwarting the fraudsters in our midst? More simply, how do we teach them things may not be as they appear?

* When I was a teacher at an international school in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia back when Al Gore was inventing the internet, the US embassy folks invited my male colleagues and me to the embassy for a meeting where they cautioned us about beautiful Ethiopian women known to seduce American men in the hope of weaseling their way out of the country. Even showed a film with case studies on how it was done. This had one effect on my friends and me. We were more excited than normal to go clubbing the next weekend. Alas, I regret I was never a victim of the honey trap. :)

House Hunters International on HGTV

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Love it.

Or I should say “really like it” since moms always says, “You can’t love something that can’t love you back.”

Each tightly packed episode is a thirty minute long travel/house hunting fix. A person, couple, or family chooses among three residences in some foreign country. Recently, while watching a college football game, I caught most of two episodes*. The first was about a British man and an American woman who met in Orange County, California. They were moving to England. Immune to our recession apparently, he needed a large garage for his cars and she needed a dance studio.

The second couple, an Irish man and an American woman moving from Chicago to Ireland, had two small girls. Appears as if Euro men are stealing our women, but I digress. Their Chicago house had a small yard “where every time the girls kicked the ball it hit the wall”. He wanted at least an acre which they eventually found a few minutes from where he grew up.

A few times in the episode he implied his girls needed a large yard, but I couldn’t help but think he was projecting his past on their present. We all do that to some degree don’t we? Recreate our childhoods for our own children in some form—whether tangibly in terms of the house and neighborhood environment or intangibly in terms of norms, expectations, ethos?

Did the toddlers really “need” a soccer pitch-sized backyard? Would their lives turn out much differently with a small yard or if they found a house near a public park? All I could think of was how much of his time and money he was going to have to spend maintaining his giant patch of grass. To each is own.

Dear HGTV network. How about a show with the same format, but focusing on minimalists proactively embracing our new economic realities by looking for smaller yards, less space, less clutter, lower energy costs? People convinced that some cliches, like “less is more,” might just be true.

House Hunters Downsizing. Or Downsizing House Hunters. Either way, I’d watch it during college football commercials.

• This requires deft remote controlling. And I’m the deftest. Which brings to mind the best sports story from the last month. A 97-year-old man who wanted to watch a Milwaukee Brewers playoff game called 911 to report someone had stolen his remote control. According to the Greenfield police report: The man called 911 to report someone had stolen his remote control from his residence in the 9300 block of West Howard Avenue prior to 8 p.m. Sept. 26. The remote control was found after police responded, so the man was able to watch the Brewers game.

Living Peacefully and Joyfully

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During Sunday night’s Skype session with Nineteen I learned she’d been on a nice walk with KN, the uber-nice mother of one of her best friends, who was visiting Midwest leafy liberal arts college for Parents’ Weekend. On that walk KN revealed that she has read three books that I’ve recommended. Cool dat. Note to self: Make a batch of “I read PressingPause.com” t-shirts to give to subscribers and loyal readers. No doubt a future status symbol*.

I have another book recommendation for KN. I don’t read books consistently enough, as a result I don’t get through all that many, as a result, I choose what I read carefully. I don’t know if I’ve ever chosen as well as in 2011. The ten month long hot streak continues with A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine (2009). So good I read it twice, the second time taking nine pages of notes since I plan on using it in a future writing seminar.

Irvine says the public’s preconceived notions about Stoicism are wrong. Stoics were fully engaged in life and worked to make the world a better place. The goal of the Stoics was not to banish emotion from life but to banish negative emotions like anger, anxiety, grief, and envy. Musonius Rufus (Is there a better jazz/funk name?) said that “a cheerful disposition and secure joy” will automatically follow those who live in accordance with Stoic principles. Would be Stoics, Irvine writes, will take to heart the Stoic claim that many of the things we desire—most notably, fame and fortune—are not worth pursuing. Instead they will turn their attention to the pursuit of tranquility and virtue.

The word “tranquility” is hardly ever used in conversation today, probably because few of us experience much of it, but it’s the central concept of the book. Irvine says “Tranquility is a state marked by the absence of negative emotions such as grief, anxiety, and fear, and the presence of positive emotions—in particular joy.” On a scale of one to ten, what’s your tranquility quotient?

The bulk of the book is about how to practice Stoicism. Irvine does a great job of adapting the Ancient Roman philosophy to modern times. He acknowledges that people should choose a philosophy of life that fits their personality and that Stoicism won’t be for everyone. He points out that in some significant ways Stoicism and Christianity overlap; consequently, they can be complementary.

For Irvine the greatest problem is that few people have any coherent philosophy of life. As a result, they succumb to mindless consumerism; consequently, at the end of the road they often regret that they’ve squandered their time. What is your philosophy of life? To what degree does it shape your day-to-day actions?

The body of the book is a description of five Stoic psychological techniques and Stoic advice on ten topics such as dealing with other people, anger, old age, and dying. Probably best read with a significant other or a small group of friends who you can discuss it with.

* Any graphic artists out there interested in creating a PressingPause logo? If so, please email me (see the “contact” tab at upper right).

Coaching’s Costs and Benefits

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My Atul Gwande bro-mance or man-crush continues to build steam. He begins his most recent New Yorker essay explaining he’s been a surgeon for eight years and. . . for the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. I’d like to think it’s a good thing—I’ve arrived at my professional peak. But mainly it seems as if I’ve just stopped getting better.

He points out that top athletes and singers have coaches and asks whether you should too. He asks the question in the context of his own story of contacting his mentor from med school, a well-known highly respected doc, to see if he’d be willing to observe him in surgery and offer suggestions. I recommend the whole essay, but long story short, Gwande breaks through his plateau as a result of his mentor’s objective, insightful, detailed feedback.

Mid-point in the essay, Gwande explains how teacher-to-teacher coaching is one of the most promising reforms being implemented in some school districts.

He also acknowledges that many of his fellow docs and many teachers probably aren’t quite secure enough to open themselves up to pointed constructive criticism.

But he fails to mention another at least equally significant hurdle, sufficient money to compensate experts for their coaching time. School districts have to release coaches from their own classrooms meaning substitutes have to be paid for or everyone has to teach larger classes. And I can’t believe he expects teachers, lawyers, dentists, and other professionals making far less than professional athletes or elite singers to pay for coaching out-of-pocket. It’s unclear how financially strapped school districts and hospitals are supposed to add in coaching costs.

If only I had a magical “financial resource” wand. Now that I’m in better touch with my stubborn, self-defeating self-sufficiency, I see areas in my life where I could benefit from coaching.

In late August the personal trainers in mom’s swanky FL health club were doing some intriguing exercises with their clients. Made me want to toss medicine balls and run around with giant rubberbands around my ankles. And I’m sure I could benefit from swimming, running, cycling, triathlon coaching. Listening/marital bliss coaching. Cooking/nutrition coaching. Gardening coaching. Bicycle maintenance coaching. Golf coaching. Social media coaching. Parenting coaching. Writing coaching.

You get the drift.