How to Easily Keep Your Family Connected in 20 Minutes a Day

May 25, 2009 By 37 Comments

How to Keep Your Family Connected

“I don’t care how poor a man is; if he has family, he’s rich.”
~Dan Wilcox, M*A*S*H

the best part of the dayWhat if I told you about an easy to manage method for keeping you and your children so connected, they will be far less likely to unplug, even when settled beneath the stormiest clouds of childhood.

In the interest of full disclosure: I do not yet have two teenagers. You may call me starry eyed, but it is my emphatic belief that though the bonds in our house will certainly mature, they will never lose the core of what we have built from the beginning; I find it impossible to imagine that concrete poured deep into consistent habits will crumble, even when shoved up against the inevitable earthquakes of adolescence that can so easily tear families asunder.

The many minutes of our lives are often only loyal subjects to the whims of our daily schedules. Yet no matter the flurry or fury of a calendar week, it is rare to not find our family breaking bread and passing it across the table during our day’s final meal.

Every day needs an anchor – a dividing line to distinguish one sunset from the next; a manner to measure that breath that exists only between exhale and inhale. In our family it is never enough to simply parse our table into four sections and allow the seconds to elapse while dinner music does the heavy lifting. We listen to dinner music, but only as percussion. The melody of our future dinnertime memories drifts through the air alongside the shared details of our day.

It is there amid the easy comfort of automatic eye contact where the notes of our days harmonize into their singular song.

We rotate around the table, each of us in turn reciting the best and worst parts of our day – those moments that for better or worse drew distinction from that day’s light. Best and worst are given equal billing, as we teach our children that only by experiencing the sour of life can they truly savor its sweet. There are few better avenues for getting to know your child then giving them a stage to stand on, then fading into the background as they articulate those things that are most meaningful to them.

We model honesty. If one of my children has done something to cast a shadow across my day, I have no difficulty letting them know it was my worst part. We expect the same candor from them. I like hearing my four or seven year say things such as, “the worst part of my day was my behavior before rest time. I could have done better,” while never once shattering the fix of their gaze.

I enjoy this not because I like to revel in the shortcomings of my offspring, but because I feel as though this type of honest self reflection is rare. Catching it in childhood is like catching a caterpillar, not near as difficult as catching it once emerged from the chrysalis of adolescence.

Cindy and I were recently wondering out loud whether the best part/worst part tradition was one we passed to our children with intention. Neither of us could honestly commit. It was something we have done together since always. We can’t put too fine a point on it, but we know we’ve been doing it since sometime before we started living together but after we knew we always would.

By the time Mia was two, the best part and worst part had three even slices. Max, who looks to his sister to learn just about everything, was cooing on cue before his answers were whistling through a freshly cut set of teeth. We love how they’ve embraced the habit and hope to see it spread to the next generation. So far so good.

The other day I was absent for dinner, my presence required at an orientation for the parents of incoming kindergartners at Max’s new school. I returned home late, but Max wasn’t quite ready to bid farewell to the moon. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” I could hear his rat-a-tat-tat as I ascended the stairs. “We did not do the best and worst part of our day,” he declared, fingers in the air and eyebrows crawling together.

“You’re absolutely right,” I said, grabbing three of his digits and leading him toward the bedroom. “What was the worst part of your day?”

“That you weren’t here for dinner,” he looked down.

“How about your best part?”

“That you’re home now and I get to tell you.” His smile spread and I tucked him in with a sigh.

Writer Dad

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Conversation That Pays Dividends

November 5, 2008 By 87 Comments

“Language is the blood of the soul into which thoughts run and out of which they grow.”

~Oliver Wendell Holmes

What makes my six year old daughter Mia so amazing to speak with is that she is, and always has been completely unafraid to ask questions.  I get the gift of gab from my mother, and passed it to my children.  Daisy and I have added plenty of food and water to this quickly flowering seed.

We both believe that it is important to speak with our children as though they understand, with unforgiving vocabulary, well ahead of any expectation of a reasonable response.  Eventually they will reciprocate, and those defining moments leading to that inevitable verbal eruption are each and every one majestic.

The fact that Mia is so undaunted when it comes to asking questions, means I’m able to lower my filter when I open my mouth.  I’m confident that if something flies over her head, there’s a near certainty that she’ll throw her arms to the sky and try to catch it.  Of course I keep the grown-up talk in the cupboard with a white, plastic child safety lock latched across the top, but I’ve never hedged on the vocabulary.  This strategy has paid in dividends far more handsome than any mutual fund I’ve ever contributed to.

Mia’s language was good when she was two, great when she was three, and amazing now at six.  I understand that comparing my daughter’s articulation to compound interest might seem a little off, but really it’s quite apt.  At first, contributions are high while the returns remain low.  Sooner or later, the interest earned starts to exceed the initial investment.

As is true with most successful ventures, we must start early to finish strong.

I am in awe of the connections that Mia is constantly making, and the verbal balls we are now bouncing back and forth.  Even more amazing is that she’s able to weave new experience into the countless little details that she has absorbed over the long years of her short life.  Mia will often reference things from her distant past, tying tidbits from long gone lessons to newly discovered details.

Knowing that Mia is storing everything inside that amazing little brain makes me far more mindful when it comes to our four year old Max.  Our first born is the child who teaches us to parent, the second is equalized by all the lessons we learned by paying attention.

With Max, I have learned that everything matters.

We only get one life, and in that life a single childhood made from a million moments, most of which fall neatly under our jurisdiction.  If there was one thing I could say to each and every parent, it is this:

Our children get it, and we should never do them, or ourselves, the disservice of underestimation.  There are no do overs.

Writer Dad

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I Heart Movies

September 3, 2008 By 86 Comments

“Movies can and do have tremendous influence in shaping young lives towards the ideals and objectives of normal adulthood.”

~Walt Disney

 

I love the movies.

Great films are best, but I’ll settle for good.  I’m even willing to watch bad, once… or twice.

My childhood was full of great cinema from a range of sources.  Saturdays were spent at my Grandparent’s, where my sister and I would camp on the carpet in front of an old wooden TV. It was the same size as a 42″ High Def set I would drool over now, except square instead of rectangle, and thick instead of thin.  

And no High Definition, but rather, limbo stick low resolution.  

But it was TV, and I was a kid.

Every weekend, an old film played on channel five.  The same one, four times.  This is where I learned to first tolerate, and then love, black and white.

In between the awesomeness of the Love Boat and the hysterical cool of Fantasy Island, I’d watch something like, “King Kong,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” or “Some Like it Hot.”

Weekends were made for movies, and a festival started on Saturday, often resumed the next day.  

A family tradition, second only to Sunday breakfast, was a trip to the theater to fill the final afternoon of our weekend.  

The experience ripened alongside our years.  As our literature aged, so did our cinema.

I remember the first R rated movie we saw:

Rain Man.  

I loved it because it told me a story in a way I’d never seen.

At least not on the big screen.

At home, we had a library, stocked with a wealth of R rated features.  These red stamped flix were supposed to be off limits.  Fortunately, my mom and dad were different, each with their own opinion about what best to withhold from a budding mind.

My father believed it important to shield us from coarse language and violence (though this did not slow words that rhyme with truck and sit from frequently fleeing his lips).  

But my mom’s objections could be summed up in a single word.

Nipples.

Not nudity mind you.  Just nipples… and the short and curlies, at least if they sprung from a lady.

The swollen underside of a breast, fine.  The lazy S of a damsel’s backside, sure.  Full frontal nudity from someone with a hairy chest and dangling participles, not a problem.

Nipples?

No way.

Now here’s a test:

At age thirteen, would my mom have preferred her son to see…

A movie where a guy gets a grenade shoved in his mouth, as he’s kicked off a cliff.  He rolls down said cliff, releasing a chain of curse words which link every oath with four letters to the few that involve immediate family.  As he exhales his final syllable, he is blown to a billion bits scattered in the bed of the basin.

OR

Franco Zeffirelli’s, “Romeo and Juliet,” which displays precisely two nipples for exactly two seconds.

High five if you picked the one that might warp me.

Like any kid worth their childhood, my sister and I were able to wade the waters of our parent’s particulars.  

We saw pretty much everything.  

By the time I could drive, I was ready for flix from art house to multiplex, which probably explains my love for Tarantino.  

Who are we but the product of an infinity of finely sliced seconds, where each one matters, at least to some degree. 

What we feed our brain is important. 

Was I feeding mine well?  How do you feed yours?

Writer Dad

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If you liked that post, you’ll love, “A Billion Pixels and None of Them Wasted,” “Batman Left My Wife Lying Crumpled on the Floor,” or “An Old Dream Come True.”

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