The Best We Could: A Parenting Manual for Our Kids The Best We Could: A Parenting Manual for Our Kids

The roles we play (or are cast) to play in our families: Patterns that were passed on to us from our parents and the patterns that we might be setting our kids up for as they grow up.

Take Aways:





* If we don’t point out these patterns to our kids, then they have a very high likelihood of repeating them.

* The role my father was made to play in his family (by default)

* The role my mother was cast in with her in-laws (my dad’s parents) as a result

* How that impacted me as a child and an adult

* How that impacted who I chose to marry (hint, I repeated the pattern)

My dad’s father did not have the awareness or the skills to address the issue with his wife

* How the pattern changed when my dad’s mother passed away (like flipping a switch)

* How this caused disagreement and discord between my mother and father

* What I want my kids to be aware of



 

Do kind kids (and adults) get taken advantage of? Perhaps, but what we have found is that being -passive- is often confused with kindness and is FAR more likely to be taken advantage of.

Take-Aways from this episode:

1: Kindness can be taken advantage of, but passivity in one’s life will be taken advantage of.

2: Passivity is often confused with kindness

3: Passivity can show up in certain areas of life and not in others; it is not black or white clear cut.

4: If you say yes to everything because you are passive and not living without a purpose, it is not really an act of kindness (if your default mode is to say “yes” to every request because you either can’t or won’t say no, it isn’t kindness, because the option to refuse didn’t exist). Kindness has to be purposeful

5: The cure for passivity in any area of life is purpose.

6: Evaluate requests or acts of kindness through the filter of your purpose and act accordingly.

7: If you are being passive, kind acts you perform without alignment with your purpose will serve to breed resentment… resentment toward the person you helped, resentment toward yourself, and resentment toward the kind act itself.

 

Several years ago, I recorded an interview with my father about a month after he was diagnosed with colon cancer. We discussed what it was like as a foreigner in the US in the 60’s, as well as his take on where kids today (including my kids) need to direct their focus in order to have a chance at success. I provide my commentary on this old interview.

Summary and Notes





* [00:01:09] How we repeat certain aspects of our parents’ parenting styles without even knowing it… in this instance why my parents did not socialize much when I was little, but they do now.

* [00:03:31] How I repeated that aspect of my parents’ behavior without realizing it… until I listened to this interview with my dad for the second time

* [00:03:46] Observations of unintended consequences of my dad’s strong self-identify as an “American.”

* [00:04:58] My observations on what my dad has to say about college for his grandkids & his work habits

* [00:10:20] Start of Interview with my dad

* [00:22:50] My dad provides an unexpected answer about assimilating to the culture at the time. This was the first time I realized this is what kept my folks (and also me) from socializing.

* [00:32:06] My summary and concluding comments on the interview, some points of agreement and disagreement, and how all this applies to children today.



 

 

My six-year-old son recently asked me to tell him a story about Christmas, specifically about the gifts I got when I was a little boy. I told him that I found it difficult to recount any gifts, not because I didn’t get any, but because with one or two exceptions, the gifts were utterly forgettable. Experiences that were given as gifts, on the other hand, produced vivid memories even decades later. In this episode, I discuss how we used to think about giving, and how we think about it now.

Summary and Notes



[00:00:50] – Lionel Train set, the annual gift tradition

[00:02:37] – Experiences vs objects for gifts

[00:06:36] – The Nerf gun vs My son’s favorite toy

[00:09:40] – Birthday party gifts, handmade… no stress

[00:13:00] – Intentionality in gift-giving

[00:18:25] – Intrinsic vs external motivations

 

Quotes from the episode:

“It was wonderful because although the experience itself was fun, the train ride in whatever, the kids are going to remember highlights from the train highlights from the hotel, but they’re going to remember being together.” [00:05:50]

“But the bottom line is that there may be a novelty to getting something new and there is value in novelty, of course. But I think that I would rather, I would rather have him focus on getting, Oh, a smaller number of quality toys. That he remembers and works with and potentially even saves as a, you know, as he grows into a young adult and then a man, versus filling our house, like a landfill filled with toys for us to trip over, and eventually either donate or give away or throw out.” [00:08:15]

“So much material stuff., it just seems like the kids are chasing the next high. It’s like. They open one thing and they can’t even look at it, and they want to know what’s next and what’s next and what’s next. And obviously eventually that ends. And it’s a huge let down because you can’t open presents from now until eternity.” [00:12:24]

“I definitely would challenge people to think about how to focus more on the experiences and if you are going to give material gifts, real intentionality behind it, like what is the kid going to get out of this. And are they going to remember it even six months from now, let alone a lifetime from now when they’re an adult.” [00:14:33]

“I want my children to understand what they are signaling to other people by wearing a specific name brand or a specific style or whatnot… And what comes along with that signaling… if they’re not aware of it (why they buy certain things), I think is the biggest danger… Granted, there can be some utility to dressing up in a certain way if your job requires that… but, at the same time, if you just go out and copy what somebody else (you admire or aspire to) is doing without thinking about that and just acquire those things because you think that by virtue of acquiring those things it will somehow imbue the qualities of someone who you aspire to be on you. Then that’s a really dangerous and slippery slope… that I once fell into” [00:19:23]

Transcript Below

How our kids will deal with peer pressure, social ostracism, and wanting to “fit in” is determined largely by how they see us dealing with these issues as parents. We recount how we were given a choice between our peer group and our kids, how we made the decision, and the consequences of our choice.

Summary and Notes

[00:01:11] – The going away party

[00:06:51] – Being ostracized used from a group

[00:10:54] – The group fractures from within

[00:15:27] – The lesson to take away

[00:17:10] – Understanding where we stand in our family

 

Quotes from the Episode:

“We prefer to take care of conflict on a personal level.” [00:05:29]

“If we roll over on this then what we are basically sending a signal that we don’t care about our children as much as we care about fitting in with your group.” [00:08:05]

“It made us realize there was more power that we had than we acknowledged.” [00:13:56]

“Understand the groups that you belong in, understand the feelings of belongingness and how that feels really good, then ask yourself what would it take to make this feeling go away.” [00:15:30]

“I think that groups and community are vital to interdependence….the important thing to know is what that group is all about and what happens to that group when it’s tested.” [00:16:19]

“It’s easy to spout platitudes and talk about family first but then to actually identify what that means and to live those values I think is extremely important and an extremely valuable lesson.” [00:17:38]

Transcript Below

What matters more, a person’s skill set, or the network of people who know about that person and their skillset?  As always, the answer is “it depends.” In this episode, I discuss Imposter syndrome and how it applies to adults (me specifically) and how this perspective might impact my children as they grow up.

Summary and Notes



[00:00:24] – Imposter Syndrome

[00:03:47] – Over-preparing/perfectionism….it’ll never be ready

[00:05:12] – Competence vs Confidence

[00:07:35] – The most important message

[00:11:24] – Conditioning in school vs the real world

[00:14:11] – Building social capital, rather than building a standalone skillset.

Quotes from the Episode:

“A lot of opportunity happens when we don’t have full information. And if we wait to have full information on something, then oftentimes that opportunity will have changed or will have entirely passed us by.” [00:02:59]

“The people who have the least competence in a subject area are, generally speaking, those who have no qualms about putting themselves out there and advertising what it is they have and making claims about what it is that they can do.” [00:05:09]

“Rather than focusing on an absolute level of skill and comparing yourself to, other people who you may never meet. Focus instead on who you can help with, the skills that you have developed.” [00:07:38]

“You have to be able to find people who find your skill valuable.” [00:08:44]

Transcript Below

Today I want to talk about one of the things that comes up for me repeatedly, and I think it’s useful for my kids to know this, and I think it’s useful for other people to understand how I’ve kind of dealt with this over the years and how I think it’s benefited me, but also how I think that it has really held me back. and that is something called imposter syndrome. Now, impostor syndrome is when. You don’t feel that you are good enough to be doing what you’re doing or you don’t feel that you are up to par with your other contemporaries in a particular field. this kind of manifested itself for me early on, I would even say probably going back into, high school where I didn’t, I was in the smart kid classes, but. I didn’t really feel like I belonged in the smart kid classes, and I realized that there’s a lot that just goes into saying the smart kid classes where I went to school, they broke you down into, the a B and C units.

And because they didn’t think that kids were smart enough to figure this out, they put all the smart kids in the C. Level classes and all of the kids who are having challenges with the educational system. We’re in the A-level classes. And so they thought that if they put the smart kids in the AA classes and the kids who are having problems in the C classes, that would unfavorably stigmatize the kids according to where they were, , kind of stratifying themselves. And they didn’t think that we were smart enough to figure that out. So just to give you kind of an idea of the, The what the learning institutions were all about when, when I was a boy, that’s the level of intellect that they thought that pretty much everybody was bringing to the game. And of course, the thing was that pretty much anybody could figure out where those kids stratified themselves in terms of not just their intellectual ability, but also their desire to be in school. I remember, there was this one kid who I went to school with who, He actually is a brilliant, brilliant kid. His mother passed away, I think maybe his freshman year of, of high school. And he actually went on to be a professor at a, at an Ivy league, university.

And in high school you would not have guessed that from just looking at his academics. he was, he was in those A classes, but he should not have been there.