Family Matters

Posts Tagged ‘change’

Now that I am of what is considered ‘adult’ age, many of my friends have started talking about leaving home. Some of my high school buddies moved out long ago and have even started families. This is obviously a stage in life that everyone experiences sooner or later.

One of the most common reasons my age-mates have suggested is that they clash very strongly with one (or both) of their parents. They are sick of being bossed around and they just need space and freedom. When this happens, I find they don’t always make the best decisions. They are so intent on running as far away as they can that they don’t realize where they are going.

Sometimes they make off with some would-be drug dealer or with a complete idiot, because “anything is better than home”. Like many people out there, when they hit 40, they realize they made a terrible mistake.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

When I was quite young (maybe 4 or 5 years old), my mom told me that one day I would have a family of my own and live in a house of my own. And I said to her, “Mom, don’t be silly, I’m always going to live at home with you and Dad”.

One of our main challenges in life is that we don’t know what we don’t know. To overcome this challenge, we must actively question our own point of view and make conscious choices, instead of accepting what we have grown into as the only possibility.

A few weeks ago, Ronit had a few sessions with a lovely little boy called Lenny (not really). He was very intelligent and very curious and bombarded Ronit with “unfiltered” questions, which got me thinking about perspective.

While he was working away on one of his assignments, Lenny asked Ronit, “Do you know that you sometimes talk to me in a different language?”

She explained to him that because we talk to our kids in a different language, she sometimes confused the languages.

He asked, “So they don’t understand what you’re saying too?”

Ronit explained that our kids understand her when she speaks the other language, because they know two languages.

Lenny said, “I don’t know any language”.

Ronit said, “You know English”.

He looked at her surprised and then said in excitement, “Yes!”

Being only 6 years old, Lenny accepts everything in his life as the only thing possible, so sometimes, he does not even need to call it by name. It is just “the thing that is” for him. The language he speaks is so obvious to him, he had never counted it as such. It was just part of life. And it never occurred to him that other kids might know other languages, simply because he doesn’t.

In the not-so-distant past, most people lived in small places and had to do things themselves. They grew crops, cared for animals, sewed their own clothes, built their own houses, met the same small group of people from childhood to old age and learned about the rest of the world only when strangers came to town.

When something broke, those “olden days” people had to fix it themselves or take it to a specialist, such as the blacksmith or the cobbler. Time was cheap and materials, like metal and medicine, were very expensive and hard to get. There was a lot of time, so life was slow. There was a lot of space and travel was slow, so there was little change.

The world’s culture evolved around this lifestyle. The main values taught to kids were self-sufficiency, industry, thriftiness, modesty, discipline and courtesy. When they grew up, they also learned faithfulness and responsibility.

I have a feeling your parents may have tried to instill some of these values in you too, even if your life was quite different. I know mine did, as did the parents of all my friends.

The general focus of people was on getting things and keeping them. There was little choice, so what people got, they enjoyed.

Today, life is radically different for most people. Most people live in big cities, have easy access to large amounts of food, drink, clothes and other goods and are exposed to a never-ending stream of high-pressured information through the TV, the radio, the Internet, the mobile phone, printed media and various other means.

The general focus of people should be on choosing things and enjoying them. But it is not.

My friend said to me, “Look around you. There are more sick people than there ever were. The food we are eating is not nutritious enough. There is too much antibiotics in meat, too much processed food and too much cancer. People are dying because of extra use of chemicals in their life. What’s your opinion?”

I had to make a decision on the spot. I knew she wanted me to support her for her kids to recognize it as something “all mothers think”, not just her being fanatic. The problem was that it was just her being fanatic.

I said, “Really?! I am looking around and I’ll tell you what I see. My dad is 77 years old and he is a pretty healthy person. My mom is 71 years old and loves doctors and medication. 6 years ago, she came to visit us and we travelled around the North Island of New Zealand for 12 days. We spent most of the day on our feet and even trekked (with then 3-year-old Noff) for about 6 hours. My mom did very well and she was 65 then. My dad did even better than she did and he was 72 years old. I am looking around and what I see is that those sick people who eat junk, food that is not nutritious enough, consume too much antibiotics with their meat and gobble up cancer-inducing processed food, those people live longer”.

Ouch!

Before you think I am crazy, here are the facts.

As a parent, I often wonder how my kids interpret their world. Besides being younger than I am and lacking experience, they have grown up in a period and an environment so different to mine this is worth looking at.

Try to remember the last time you watched the news on TV. The anchors smiled most of the time, didn’t they? They even exchanged jokes from time to time, right? But the topics on the news were all doom and gloom – shootings, robberies, dishonest politicians, government decisions you may not like, etc.

Is it appropriate to behave cheerfully when you deliver bad news?

Now, consider most of the “sitcoms”. In a typically conversation, the audience is the real listener and the participants are just acting out a script, so delivering hurtful words, putting others down and using sarcasm are all “part of the deal”, while keeping a posture and facial expression that says, “Yeah! I’m all that”.

But in our daily life, there is no audience. The only ones hearing the words are us and we get hurt by them. And when someone we love says something that hurts and looks like they have just won the lotto, it makes us wonder how much they care.

I believe these things (and others) are leading our kids to distrust body language, facial expression and tone of voice as ways to receive messages from others. Worse, by often mimicking this inconsistent behavior, our kids are actually training themselves to lie better, which makes me worry for them sometimes.

The last month has been a bit cold in Brisbane (not snowing or anything, just chilly). We bought a pile of wood to put in our fireplace, but since our ceiling is very high, it takes a while to heat the whole house. So for the first 10 minutes of the morning, each of us has a small heater in the room and we get dressed in front of it and Gal and I have a radiator heater in our office, which keeps us fairly warm.

Last week, on Saturday, our 9-year-old daughter Noff got up and stood next to the radiator. She was feeling cold and while we prepared breakfast, she brought the radiator next to the dining table and stood next to it, refusing to move. While we were setting the table, she peeked under the dining table, looked at the radiator and said in a triumphant voice, “I have an idea!”

Being parents means our job is to prepare our kids for the future, particularly for the unfortunate event of us stopping to be there for them. Whitney Houston made the phrase “I believe the children are our future” famous singing The Greatest Love of All.

Yeah, well, this is exactly it: we need to stop thinking about how we used to be and focus more on how things are for our kids right now and how they are likely to be for them in the future. Lingering in the past is possibly the biggest disservice we can do for them.

We must grasp the idea that our kids’ life is going to be incredibly different from ours and that there is really no way to know for sure what it is going to be like. In fact, it is likely to keep changing all the time and very rapidly, which means we need to build them for change.

This is the message from Julia, describing her sleep problem with her daughter. When she sent me the question, it was easier for me to give her a call and answer her question, but I wanted to share it with you too, just in case you are having similar challenges.

Hi Ronit,

I have looked around your site to try and find some info on sleep problems with kids but had no luck. I know you are very busy, but thought I would ask just in case you can direct me to something that could help me?

My 8 1/2 yr old daughter cannot put herself to sleep, we have her in a single bed next to ours, and one of us has to go to bed at the same time as her, and usually we fall asleep, as it takes her a while to nod off. So as you can see, there is never any ”adult time” in our house. Things are getting rather desperate, as it creates a lot of problems as you can imagine. Hoping you might have time at some point to help me.

Thank you,

Julia.

Next month, for the second time, I am taking a group of 50 student leaders from 7 schools to a leadership camp called “Kids Leading Social Change”. The reason I gave the program this name is that I believe kids can lead social change.

One of my 11th Grade teachers told me that if I make a difference in the lives of four people and they make a difference in the lives of four people each, and the cycle of change continues, after a very short time, we will make this world a better place.

Six kids who attended the previous camp organized other students from their school, with the help of their chaplain, and wrote an intergenerational play for elders. They performed their play during Senior Week in front of 400 elders. My teacher said I needed to change only four people, but soon after that camp, I had reached over 400.

When I prepared the camp for them last year, I searched the Internet for things kids can do to make a difference and found a great big list of kids and their ideas for making a difference. I have added my ideas at the bottom of the list and I hope that after next month’s camp, I will add more.

I have written a lot about the fear of failure, but I think many people are not aware this fear has a twin brother – the fear of success.

Fear of failure will make you try to fit into a standard (usually external), but fear of success will make you do anything to avoid reaching that standard.

While fear of failure is out there and everybody knows about it, fear of success is hidden so deep in our identity we may not recognize it, but it can be much worse for us.

Fear of failure is associated with making mistakes and not getting approval, while fear of success is the fear of doing things right and therefore not being accepted, not being appreciated and not being able to maintain the level of achievement and success.