But when you try to do that, do your children immediately launch into a trying negotiating process that test your endurance to the utmost?

Some kids love to respond to every little rule you want to lay down, to the most trivial request you make of them, with a challenge, a counter-proposal, or at best, a bid for a compromise. They may never stop doing this from morning to night.

If that description fits your child, or even if he or she is only an occasional offender,  it would be wise  to tread very carefully. In analyzing the dynamics at play here,  behavioral Jame Lehman, creator of the Total Transformation Program, makes an interesting analogy. He compares the mindset of the child to that of people playing the slot machines at the corner cafe or a casino.

Ultimately, the machine will take all their money. That’s what its owner put it there for. But if the machine would relieve them of everything right way, they would never go back. So what does it do?  It takes a little of their money, then gives some back, then takes more and gives a little back. Now and again,  players may even hit the jackpot, which only provides an incentive to keep on playing in the expectation of greater things to come.  A vain hope, but the machine has trained them well.

It’s the same with our kids, says Lehman.  They’re like gamblers.  Once we let them over-negotiate or wear us down (even if the end result is “no”), then our children never know if this time they’ll get lucky.  If they  don’t get their way this time, then maybe they will next time. At any rate, what have they to lose, so why not take a shot?

But the truth is, we are the one’s who train our kids to do that!

You tell your  precious son and heir,  who hasn’t the best reputation for punctuality, to be sure to be home, at least this once, by 7 pm for dinner. You have an important engagement at 8, and you want the table cleared and everything organized before you leave.

So your “little lawyer” tries his luck: “Aw, man, must I leave the game in the middle? Why not 7.30?  I’ll serve myself and wash up, I promise. I know where everything goes.”

You have several reasons why you don’t want that, and you’re not in the mood for explaining why. On the other hand, you can’t stand the whining any longer…

“OK”, you finally concede, resigning yourself to an inevitable mad dash to get to your meeting more or less on time..if you’re lucky! “Just see that you’re here at 7.15 – and not a second later!”

As Lehman points out: kids are going to test limits., that’s their job. What parents forget sometimes is that it’s their job to stand firm!

For a continually updated list of top-rate articles by James Lehman and his colleagues, see here. They represent some of the best advice on parenting and child behavior issues you’ll find anywhere.

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.

To be more specific, marital conflict can be bad for your health. A growing body of research now bears this out, points out Dr Joshua Coleman, prolific contributor to our site (as well as dozens of media outlets around the world) on parenting and family dynamics, in his e-newsletter, The Coleman Report .

Some of the evidence: Ongoing marital conflict appears to worsen the symptoms of women with rheumatoid arthritis and results in elevated blood pressure for both men and women. Marital conflict may also worsen the symptoms of neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s. And more.

But it’s not only a question of physical health, and observable physical symptoms are only part of it. Nor is it only the two spouses that suffer. Dr Coleman reminds us that high conflict marriages also interfere with the ability to parent for both genders.

Studies show that fathers are more likely to withdraw from their children and from the parenting role in marriages that are characterized by ongoing conflict. In addition, they may become more negative and intrusive with their children than fathers in satisfactory marriages, or mothers in poor marriages.

Other studies reveal that the mother’s feelings about the father can affect how much he stays involved with the kids and how much he enjoys being a Dad. Angry mothers are more likely to try and exclude fathers from child involvement than mothers who aren’t angry. Both mothers and fathers are more likely to be depressed in a high conflict marriage.

Dr. Coleman alerts us to some of the most common underlying causes of marital strife. Typically, a combination of several are involved. These include: growing up in a home where there was ongoing marital conflict, outside stressors (such as worry over money, career, in-laws), and inside stressors (such as differences in parenting attitudes, division of household labor, spending habits, differences in sex drive, etc.).

Most telling of all, in most high conflict marriages, one or both spouses have never learned how to communicate.

The bottom line: if the above sounds painfully familiar, get help now! However hopeless the situation may seem to you right now, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have only two choices: get divorced or live a life of hell forever. Far from it; you may be pleasantly surprised.