After a night lost to site migration and other busywork, this was one of the highlights of Monday for me:
I got a chance to see Steven Wright perform in the late 1980s in the Chicago suburbs. My friend and I sat behind a laugh-talker who kept leaning over to her friend to explain the jokes. Anyone who has heard Steven Wright’s material will know how annoying that kind of running commentary might be. Thankfully, any such chatter is completely separated form his jokes on Twitter ().
“It’s funny because it’s true” goes the familiar statement of the obvious, but Wright’s observation made me consider life from my son’s perspective. I’m too far removed from childhood to be able to get at these kinds of thoughts myself without regular therapy, but Carter is in the middle of these kinds of messages all the time.
Sometimes, it is a matter of conflicting parental boundaries between Amy and myself. Dad says we head back for the nighttime routine when the clock gets to a certain point, whereas Mom says eat if you’re hungry (even if the boys procrastinated on this until after the nightly deadline, after declining the food they had on their plate an hour before). Sometimes, the conflict is a matter of choices. Two friends invite you to play, but don’t want to play with each other. Sometimes, though, it is a mixed message sent by society. We see this a lot when looking at television shows versus the way we choose to live our lives, or in education where the goals are to optimize learning but the actions restrict how children are able to learn.
In design, we train ourselves to be aware of the biases we bring into the inquiry and to find ways to step back and allow other perspectives to influence us. In parenting, those usually aren’t the lessons being taught. Authority, responsibility and limitation are the parenting norms. One has to work hard to parent in ways our parents did not while reinforcing the good they did in the process. When my mood is frayed or my focus is elsewhere—which happens frequently during these grad school years—the easy thing is to fall back to mimicry. Do the things that were done to you, say the things you used to hear.
As in Steven’s punchline, sometimes the results of conflicting messages aren’t the actions we hope for.
1 reply on “Conflicting Messages”
While I don’t want to veer off course of your point, I do feel compelled to point out that my concerns about bedtime snack are mostly centered around my sleep-needs, which are met by Archie eating a high protein/fat snack before snoozing.
I do find it ironic that all the fitness magazines offer up the advice of grazing throughout the day, rather than having large meals, but with children we focus on “not spoiling” the large meals and in essence, teach them to ignore their bodies’ signals.