Going Out: To Tell or Not to Tell the Kids?

As a parent, I am sure you are familiar with the “Mommy and Daddy are going out” storm. You put the kids to bed, kiss them good night, wait until everything is quiet, you sneak the babysitter in and just as you are about to leave, you hear a tiny, not-at-all-sleepy voice calling out, “Where are you going?”

In the next few minutes, you do you best to reassure your kids that you will be back, that the babysitter is a good and reliable person, who will take good care of them, and besides, you are going to be back in no time.

Alas, the little ones have you all figured out, and they cling to you, wail, throw themselves on the floor, pretend to be sick and put on various other unethical displays of utter desperation.

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Talk to the Heart

One day, I got a phone call from a mother, who was interested in our child coaching. I talked to her for a while to get a good understanding of her situation. During this conversation, we talked about things that were application to many parent-child situations, which I have since repeated with many parents, so here it is for everyone’s benefit.

Margaret: I have a problem with my teenage son, Jeff. He is 13 years old and I have completely lost control of him.

Gal: How do you mean?

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Just Wait Until Your Kids Become Teens

About 16 years ago, I went to visit a family member, who had her first child at the age of 42. I was very happy for her and traveled for 2 hours to see her precious new baby.

She was so overwhelmed by the 10 days of the “mom experience” she had had – sleepless nights, initial breastfeeding pains and crying – that for about 3 hours, she kept saying to me, “Ronit, just wait until you have a baby. Then you’ll see”, and I just smiled.

You see, motherhood can be hard at first, but when she said that, my own daughter was already 3 years old and I loved every minute of raising her and considered it a lot more rewarding than difficult.

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Are We Clear?

Some time ago, my daughter Eden had a very busy time with her Event Management studies, work and social life, and Ronit and I tried to keep up with her by asking for her plans and then keeping each other up to date.

One day, Eden said to me “I have no classes tomorrow”, and I thought she might be spending the day at home, catching up, and maybe we can spend some time together.

In the evening, when we were talking about the next day, however, Ronit said to me “Eden is going to study tomorrow”.

“That can’t be”, I said, “She told me she wasn’t going to study”.

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Parenting the Socrates Way: Types of Questions

Over the last two weeks, I presented the technique of parenting the Socrates way through questions. The first chapter introduced the benefit of asking questions. The second chapter discussed the right and wrong questions to ask. This week, we will explore the types of questions that you can use to stimulate thinking, creativity, focus, proportion, clarity, motivation and growth in your children.

“An honest man is always a child”
– Socrates

Open questions – Questions that make kids think.
For example, “What do you think?”

Closed question – Questions that can be answered with “yes” or “no”.
For example, “Would you like to come with me to the shops?”

Why questions – Questions that go deep in order to find reasons (and can encourage the kids to give excuses or to blame someone, so be careful about them).
For example, “Why are your hands dirty?”

Rhetorical questions…

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Sarcasm – The Weapon of Helplessness

Ronit and I have a very good friend, who has been in a difficult personal situation in the past couple of years. He feels very frustrated by his circumstances and sees himself powerless to break out of them and live a happy life again.

Often, when he talks to other people, he uses sarcasm.

For example, one day he was contacted by a large company, which I was not familiar with. He got excited about it, but wanted to seem like he was keeping his cool, so as not to get disappointed if he did not get an order from them later on. So he said to me, “Gal, I just got off the phone with company XYZ”.

“What is this company?”, I asked.

“Oh, it’s just a small company nobody knows”, he said in a seemingly casual tone.

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Parenting the Socrates Way: How to Ask Questions

Last week, I introduced parenting the Socrates way, where I outlined the benefits of parenting by asking questions. So how to ask questions that will develop your kids and help them grow?

Let’s continue with this parenting technique and explore the “right and wrong” questions and the “right and wrong” answers.

Right and Wrong Questions

When I introduce this technique to parents, many of them ask about the right and wrong questions to ask their children. As you probably know (from reading previous posts), “right” and “wrong” are not words I like to use. I do not believe questions can be divided into “right” or “wrong”. I prefer to call them “effective” or “not effective”.

There are 6 things you can do to make sure your questions are effective.

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Beliefs of Assertive People

Assertive people have sets of beliefs that help them to be assertive. If you want to find out what you need to do to become an assertive person, examine your beliefs.

Here is a set of questions to help you examine your beliefs:

– What do I think about this belief?
– Where did I get this belief (past outcome, education, media, environment, creative thinking)?
– How old was I when I adopted this belief?
– Is this belief good for me to have?

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Parenting the Socrates Way: Asking Questions

There is a period in children’s development when they ask questions in response to everything you say. I remember the “Why” as my kids’ way of learning.

“Eden, please bring me the plate form the table”

“Why do you want the plate?”

“I want to put the egg on it”

“Why do you want to put the egg on it?”

“So you can take it to the table and eat it”

“Why do you want me to eat it?”

“Eggs are healthy. If you eat your egg, you won’t be hungry and you will be healthy”

“Why do you want me to be healthy?”

And this went on and on and on… If I remember correctly, most of these conversations ended with “because I have said so”.

I think that Socrates, the great philosopher, never got over this stage of his development and perhaps this is what got him going on his quest for knowledge and understanding of life. Mentally, Socrates was just a curious kid. His mind was full of questions and through them he gained a lot of wisdom.

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How to Be Assertive

Last week, in Assertiveness and Self Esteem, I touched on assertiveness as a tool to build self-esteem. I believe there is much to learn and the benefits from this learning are wonderful. So today, I’m going to tell you how to be assertive.

Communication is an important part of everyone’s life and conflicts are inevitable. No two people react the same way to all situations. If you choose the aggressive approach, either physical or verbal, you risk the relationship, but if you choose the passive approach, you risk the relationship too.

An assertive approach from both parties can contribute a lot to the communication and the relationship between the two parties.

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