And he never deviated from this style, however impractical or ridiculous the worker’s suggestion might have appeared to him at first glance.

Instead of saying, for example, “This idea will cost too much”, the president would throw out a challenge by asking: “How might you reduce the cost?” or “How might you raise the money to develop this idea?” Instead of offering a prophecy of doom by saying: “Management will never accept this idea” he would inquire: “How might you get management’s support?”

Seems to me that the simple, yet underrated, communication concept used by our president has applications in many areas outside the world of business. Not least of these involves a class of people interacting with whom – or perhaps more accurately, attempting to interact with them – causes many older folk to almost tear out their hair in frustration.

I refer, of course, to our attempts to communicate on a deeper level with our children, especially teenagers. Adolescents, after all, have a reputation for being uncommunicative- a phenomenon most marked precisely when we badly want to get through to them!

The question is what we can do to reverse the trend, to get our older kids to open up to us – without wearing ourselves out with excessive nagging and prodding, and without counterproductive threats or bribes.

Professional counselor and columnist Azra Buksh presents some useful tips to help parents and other seniors succeed in what often appears to be a futile quest. She concludes her list with examples of two contrasting kinds of questions we can use when engaging our children in conversation.

The first type of question she calls “door openers” – non-judgmental, non-threatening, open-ended questions that invite and encourage the one being addressed to respond in kind, to “open up” and express his or her thoughts in full measure, without fear of criticism or retribution. The questions of the second type – the “door-slammers” – imply judgment, disrespect and criticism, or at best, condescension. The result, therefore, will be exactly the opposite of what should hopefully be achieved with questions of the first category.

These are Dr. Buksh’s examples of both types:

Door openers

“What do you think?”“That’s a great question”
“Would like to share more about that?”
“I don’t know, but I will try to find out.”
I am interested in what you are saying”
“Do you know what it means?”
“Are you ready to talk about it?”
“ That’s sounds important to you”
“I don’t have answer now, but I will talk to you about this tomorrow”.
“I know I did not clarify this next time I will do better.”

Door slammers

“Stop asking such questions”.
“You don’t need to know that”
““Why do you want to talk about this?
“Don’t talk to me if you mess up”
“We will talk about it when time comes; you are too young for all this”.
“That’s just not for Boys/girls”.
“ I don’t care what your friends are doing:”
‘I have no time for such foolishness.”.
“ When I was your age, I was not like you”
“It’s your entire fault.”

“Sorry,” apologizes the gatekeeper, “your Daddy’s busy at a very important meeting right now, try later.” The kid does try later, in fact several times “later”, but on each occasion he gets a similar response.

But being, after all, the son of a highly successful executive, he’s not one to give up on a challenge so easily. Eventually, he manages to reach his father on his car phone, as he’s speeding along, already fifteen minutes late, to an urgent rendezvous with a business associate. As he drives, Dad is making all kinds of intricate calculations in his head in preparation for the meeting ahead.

“Oh, it’s you, Ricky,” exclaims an irritated and impatient father. “Don’t you know I’m busy? I’ll be home later….”

“Dad, I won’t keep you. Can I just ask a quick question? How much do you earn?”

“Oh, I don’t know…perhaps $120 an hour..”

“Thanks, Dad.” Click!

As a worn and weary executive walks in the door around 9 that evening, Ricky thrusts a little plastic bag into his hand. The bag contains a bunch of assorted notes and coins totaling about $30.

“This is the money I’ve been saving up, Dad. Can I buy 15 minutes of your time?”

In an earlier post, I discussed an interesting social paradox: as the economies of developed countries grow stronger, the income of the average citizen grows as well. But for the most part, people aren’t any happier than they were before. Why?

I elaborated on one economics professor’s very plausible theory, which is supported by some telling experiments by social psychologists. The real problem is that people are in the habit of comparing their lot with others. If I have a million but you have two million, I have to be feeling miserable. My million is almost worthless to me.

That’s a fine explanation as far as adults are concerned, but what about our children? Why are so many children in affluent countries so darn miserable?

Sue Palmer, a British consultant on early childhood education and author of the best selling “Toxic Childhood”,  cited in a feature in the Daily Mail last year a UNICEF report on “childhood well-being”  that found  that out of 21 nations across the developed world, British children are the unhappiest.

And of course, although the British may technically be winners of this contest that no one  would want to  win,  we have  no reason to believe  that  most other civilized  nations are very  far behind.

Palmer tries  to understand why this should be so.  “Our homes are crammed with labour-saving devices and electronic entertainment that previous generations couldn’t even dream of.  Surely our children should be growing happier every year?” she asks.

She  quotes a  damning survey by the National Consumer Council, which  revealed that children who watch too much television and spend hours on the internet are “greedy and unhappy…These children argue more with their families, have a lower opinion of their parents, and lower self-esteem than other children.”

That explains a little of course, but why are these kids sitting all day in front of the electronic media  in the  first  instance?

Palmer gets to the heart of the matter:  “After researching the state of modern childhood for over five years, I’m convinced that, as our country has grown richer and more “advanced”, we’ve lost sight of certain fundamental truths about child-rearing.

“We’ve come to believe that 21st century children are different from children in the past – that they can get by with less parental time and attention, skip stages in their development and cope with pressures and emotional burdens children shouldn’t have to cope with.

“The brutal truth is that they can’t. Life may have changed enormously over the past few decades, but the human brain evolves much more slowly – in fact, it hasn’t changed since Cro-Magnon times.

“All babies are born as little Stone Age babies, and it’s up to their parents – supported by their wider community – to help them towards maturity, gradually equipping them with the inner strength, skills and knowledge they need to live in a complex technological culture…”

Significantly, Palmer also stresses the  natural obligation of parents to help their children  get a  early start in the mastery of communication skills,  so crucial for successful  emotional and social development.

“As parents sing and talk to their babies, they awaken the language instinct wired deep in the human brain and provide the data through which children will learn to speak their mother tongue.

“But if adults don’t spend time with their children, communication skills won’t develop as they should – and, in a busy modern world, many parents aren’t available to play their part in this process.

“Many children now spend the majority of their day in institutional care.

“At home, babies often sit in front of an electronic babysitter and, as they grow older, there is that problem of older children having TVs in their rooms, which means that even when the family is in the same building, its members are splintered off from each other.

The more than ironic bottom line: in a world where there are more ways to communicate than ever before, parents communicate less and less with their own children!

We will be talking more about  some implications of these heartrending  facts and various issues arising from them in upcoming posts.

Junior High School 22, a hotbed of drugs and violence, was one of the most dangerous spots in New York City. No surprise that it had gone through six principals in two years. And no surprise that the teachers, pupils and parents alike were convinced that the most unlikely new incumbent would be out the door even quicker than his hapless predecessors.

How wrong they were! What were the “secret weapons” that enabled Shimon Warringer to turn the situation around in hardly no time at all? True, one or two things in his personal background proved to be somewhat to his advantage. But above all, this story is a moving testimony to what empathy, warmth and unconditional love, together with a strong, unshakable vision, can achieve.

Watch this video and be moved. And then, don’t just move on to your next task for the day and put it out of your mind. Take it to heart. You, too, can make a difference in this world. At least with your own kids.

The University of Maryland’s Professor Linda Coleman, former director of the Freshman Writing Program at the University, offers some very handy writing tips to enable any student to turn out top-notch term papers, essays and assignments. Here are some of them:

1. Read the assignment sheet carefully and follow instructions. You’d be surprised how often students make mistakes because they think they remember what was on the assignment sheet. Read any additional material your teacher gives you.

2. Break the task into segments and assign a “date for completion” to each segment. For a paper, this is likely to include topic selection, initial planning, initial research (if research is required), follow-up research, multiple drafts and a final proofreading. Put these in your personal organizer. (If you don’t have one, get one.)

• • Allow time for major editing and revision, including at least a couple of drafts, before the final draft. (You will almost never hand in a first draft.)

• Allow time for a final proofreading before the paper is handed in. A surprising number of papers lose points because of sloppy final proofreading.

3. Hope for the best but plan for the worst.

• • Save your work often, and save it to more than one location: not just your hard drive, but also a CD, zip disk, flash drive, external drive, etc.

• • From time to time, email your work to yourself. That way, if your computer crashes, you’ll have a copy of a recent draft available in cyberspace.

• Don’t expect to print your paper the day it’s due. Make sure you have a back-up plan in case your printer doesn’t work, and leave yourself plenty of time to put it into action.

4. Invest in a good handbook. Many teachers in writing classes assign handbooks as required texts. If your teacher doesn’t, find one or ask your teacher for a recommendation. Handbooks will help you write every paper you are assigned in college. They include information on how to remedy a host of common writing problems, suggestions for gathering and organizing materials for research papers, and very importantly information about how to avoid plagiarism (a serious offense in the academic community).

5. Whenever you sit down to work on a paper, take a few minutes to look at the comments your teacher made on your previous work. Few things are less fun than revisiting work you’ve already done, but those comments are designed to help you improve your work on the next paper. List two or three things you want to do better in the paper you are working on now and check the list frequently.

6. Write to your audience, not to yourself. Whether you have a constructed audience or are writing a paper for the teacher, adjust your writing style and content to your reader(s), taking into account what they already know and believe and what you want them to conclude from your paper.

7. Try these techniques for editing and revision:

• • For the rhetorical effect of the paper: when you’ve finished a draft, list the three or four most significant things you wanted to get across. Then re-read the paper and decide whether you in fact did get those points across.

• • For paragraph coherence: try reading each paragraph by itself, starting from the end of the paper. In the margin beside each paragraph, write in one sentence what the paragraph is about. (If you start to run out of space, you probably have an incoherent paragraph.) Check to see whether your topic sentence matches what you have written in the margin. Possibly, what you’ve written in the margin would make a better topic sentence.

• • For detail: read your paper, or sections of it, aloud. Reading aloud helps you catch errors or gaps that silent reading often lets you slide over.

8. Revise, revise, revise. And then do a final proofreading to make sure everything is perfect.

Now it’s up to you! Happy writing, and look forward to the great grades you richly deserve!

When you apologize, you are saying that you share values with the offended party regarding appropriate behavior towards each other. You are saying that you regret that you didn’t conduct yourself according to those values – whether intentionally or unintentionally – and from this point on you’ll try harder to live up to your shared standards of behavior.

Of course, you apology must not be faked. A hollow apology, certainly, is worse than none at all. By definition, an apology is a sincere commitment to positive change, not a convenient device to avoid facing the music. And when business people routinely say “Sorry I can’t take your call”, or “Sorry I kept you waiting”, does anyone believe they mean it?

In a book called Healing Words: The Power of Apology in Medicine, Michael Woods, MD, bemoans the fact that the words “I’m sorry!” don’t seem to exist in the average doctor’s vocabulary, at least when talking to patients. The author advises his colleagues to put into practice his “four R’s of apology”, which will help to increase patient satisfaction and decrease the likelihood of malpractice lawsuits. (I would hope he sees the latter reason as an added benefit, not the main purpose!)

Even if formulated with doctor’s in mind, these four R’s are certainly worthy of study by anybody:

• Recognition – knowing when an apology is in order. Read the feelings of the patient and family: Fear, disappointment, or anger?
• Regret – responding empathetically. Tell the patient you’re sorry for what he’s going through. Acknowledge his fear, disappoint, or anger. Remember: an expression of regret is not an admission of guilt or fault.
• Responsibility – owning up to what’s happened. Be accountable for the problem, even if it was unforeseeable. Disclose and explain details that led to the outcome.
• Remedy – making it right. Explain to the patient what’s being done to correct the problem. Let the patient know you will not to abandon him.

I read recently about a very special school teacher who had a very curious and effective method of punishment. The writer of the story, who felt privileged have been one of his pupils, only fully understood the method behind the madness many years later, after his revered teacher had passed on from this world.

I don’t know whether it’s still so common today, but then a traditional form of punishment for a student who did something unacceptable was to order to him to write a sentence over and over again a number of times: “I will not talk to my friends in class,” “I will not throw projectiles,” or whatever. Depending on the severity of the transgression, such sentences (pun not intended!) were handed down as an order to write 50, 100, or at a maximum, 500 or so lines.

This enterprising educator, however, would command the culprit to write the assigned sentence seven or eight thousand times!

On the other hand, there was a way out – a very easy way from one perspective, an unpleasant one from another. Any pupil who would come after class and beg forgiveness, would have his punishment waived.

Only long afterwards did the writer realize his teacher’s motive. It wasn’t sore wrists that he wanted. On the contrary, the excessive number of lines was designed to discourage the offenders from actually carrying out the sentence.

What he wanted his young charges to understand was that they should apologize and ask forgiveness. Only if the assigned task was especially daunting would they swallow their pride and come begging.

What better lesson could any teacher give to impressionable young people in the process of forming habits that will last a lifetime.

Surely, this is education at its best!