First post

OK, many many years after first reading a blog, I'm getting down to actually starting one.

I thought that I could post about topics of interest to people in Silicon valley, other dads and yada yada yada. Who knows. One of the first things that I wanted to talk about is parenting - it's hard! But one of the unusual phenomenons about parenthood is language. Normally when you kid does something that emotionally reactivates you, you respond by doing what your parents did/said (Or what you perceive as the opposite of what your parents did - which is essentially the same thing). If you had perfect parents, this might be a good thing, but let's face it, most of us had good, not perfect parents.

The real question is how do you after a hard day of work deal with it when you come home and your kids won't listen to you? Do you blow up? Do you ignore it? What do you do? A couple of years ago, I noticed that I was starting to get really mad about it, but wasn't sure what to do. Then we were in a parent participation pre-school that had an adult education component (Pre-School Family). In one of the classes we talked about things you could say when your kids weren't listening - some of them were really great - like asking the question - "are you using your listening ears?" Asking a question like that produced dramatically different results - usually the kids laughed and started actually listening. It's weird how having a linguistic tool like that can produce very different results - anyone else out there have any examples? I'll be talking about others as we continue. . . . thanks.