I'd Rather Be Writing » parenting

Avoiding the Shut Down Mode

Tom Johnson — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:50:53 +0000

In a recent episode of This American Life titled “Going Big,” Geoffrey Canada explains his model of Baby College, which is a nine-week workshop where poor, inner-city parents to be learn to raise their children in ways that break their children out of the poverty cycle. Canada gives up on breaking the parents out of the poverty cycle and instead focuses on teaching parents the childhood rearing techniques that will enable the children to break free.

What exactly are these techniques? Nothing that middle-class suburban families don’t already know — read to your children, encourage your children with positive words and praise, give your children opportunities to develop and play, and other norms. In contrast, Canada said some parents in poverty circles feel that a well-behaved child is one who sits quietly and keeps to himself. At every point they seem to “shut a child down” — saying Sit down, Be quiet, Keep your hands to yourself, Get over here, Shut your mouth, and so on.

Listening to Canada describe the behavior, I thought of an experience I had while living in Harlem. I was going to graduate school at Columbia, and due to housing shortages and high costs of living, we lived on 134th and Lexington. One day while walking down the sidewalk, we saw a mother scolding her boy, who was no more than 10. Apparently he had said a swear word or two, and the mother said, “Boy, you better shut your *&^%^& mouth or I’ll whack you,” or something like that.

It struck me as absurd. Didn’t the mother realize where her son had learned to swear? It was the equivalent of a parent smacking a child because the child smacked someone, and telling the child — while smacking him — not to smack anybody. Could it be any more obvious?

This was, as you probably guessed, before we had our own children, and since then we’ve realized that it’s not always so easy to avoid this behavior. But what Canada said — about parenting that “shuts a child down” rather than lifts him up — made me think.

Shutting a child down, he said, prevents the child from developing and exploring and discovering the world, which is how children learn and grow. If you force children to sit quietly on the couch, probably watching TV, never speaking up, keeping to themselves, and never going outside prescribed boundaries, you prevent them from growing through the active development that occurs when children can freely express and explore their environment as themselves.

It’s easier to explain this model than to actually implement it, because last night at the dinner table, while I was relaying this to Jane, our three children were howling like wolves in the living room so loud I could hardly hear myself think. Five minutes later, they were prancing around naked in a ceremonial-like chant prior to their bath. As I tried to restrain myself from “shutting them down” and instead let them reap whatever development they could from hooliganism, we finally both told them to basically pipe down and get in the tub.

Later that night, as I was trying to help the littlest two fall asleep, they snuck out and showed me how they had abundantly decorated their faces with felt-tip markers. I was already frustrated with something I couldn’t figure out on the computer, and since it was the ninth time I had to guide them back to their rooms, I was pretty angry and let them know it. I snatched the pens and washed their faces with soap and water somewhat harshly.

We’re lucky we have girls, because as far as I can tell, boys can be worse in the way they explore and express themselves. My colleague explained how he recently purchased new couches and came home one day to find his boy had taken a knife to each of the cushions, making big holes. Other parents’ boys I know like to put pennies in VCR slots. When they come over to our house, their kids are pushing every little knob and button they can find.

And yet, despite the craziness, destruction, and inappropriate use of seemingly everything, this is how children learn and discover and grow. Lock them up in a dark room, where they can’t see or hear or do anything, or make them sit quietly, where they can’t freely move about and express themselves as self-acting individuals, and you lock them from growth.

I’m not recommending a parenting model that eliminates correction or restrictions on children, because I’m still doing it every day. If my children had their way, they would eat Skittles for dinner, watch Phineas and Ferb until about midnight, and then fall asleep on the floor in their clothes, without brushing their teeth, saying their prayers, or reading any books. So of course there is some balance to this freedom model. But something just feels right about giving children freedom to act independently without always shutting them down, even when they’re out of line.

As I thought more about this parenting model, I also thought about professionals in careers. It seems at some point, you learn in your job that you should sit still, keep to yourself, restrain from experimentation and foolishness, and simply do the tasks that you’ve been given. We lose our sense of discovery and experimentation. People get a little uncomfortable when you do something they didn’t request and which they’re not expecting. When you break free of previous expected norms and try something new, you take risks that aren’t always rewarded.

The activity in which you break free could be anything — decorating your cube, implementing an extremely conversational style in your writing, putting in some elaborate graphics. Maybe you’re a manager who decides to switch places with colleagues for a day, or you’re at team lead who conducts a meeting that consist entirely of role-playing scenarios. If you’re a technical writer, maybe you decide to spend half a day playing ping pong with the developers just to build rapport, or you curiously lop off the first five pages of legal and useless introductory material of your help content because you “just don’t like it.” Maybe you style the table of contents in an experimental way, or start embedding Flash videos in PDFs.

Whatever the activity, if it doesn’t involve some level of play, some movement outside the prescribed box, then haven’t you become the same child sitting quietly on the couch, keeping his mouth shut and his hands to himself because that’s the box your parents — or manager or company — put you in? The overall effect of these experiments and expressions, even when inappropriate or inefficient, is growth and awareness in ways that that worker who has been “shut down” will never know.

Blog Sponsors

Writing Style Guides and Your Parenting Style

Tom Johnson — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 13:03:08 +0000

A lot of departments think that a team needs a style guide and a unified approach, if you want the audience to experience a consistent, professional branded experience. I used to think the same. In fact, just last week, we started discussing whether to use greater than symbols (>) or pipes (|) or nothing at all to indicate menu hierarchy and subtabs. I admit that a team needs to be on the same general page. And in a lot of situations, providing writers with a style guide helps them with a basic grounding that they need to be productive.

And yet, it’s been nearly two years now at my job, and we still don’t have an official team style guide beyond the Microsoft Manual of Style or Chicago. Somehow, not having a style guide has not been a detriment. Not having a style guide gives us certain liberties — liberties to adapt to the situation and use our best judgment, to experiment with new approaches and techniques, and to choose the language and style that best fits the specific project, situation, and audience. Best of all, we never feel cramped by what inevitably seem to be limiting policies and strictures.

This insight into a more open style also has some applications into parenting. This summer, we’ve had two friends and their children stay with us. There’s nothing like a guest with children at your house to see how different your own parenting style is. Discrepancies abound in almost everything, from when you put the kids down, to the routine you use at night, the number of baths you give your kids a week, their TV watching permissions, disciplinary techniques such as time out, what you force your kids to eat at the table, whether you spank your children, whether you use diversion instead of directness, whether you play with your children, whether they must clean up after dinner, whether you send your kids to public school, private school, or home school, and so on.

Although almost none of us has had training as a parent, we’re all pretty set in the correctness of our parenting methods. However we’ve come to embrace our style, we carry it out with rigidity and an unwavering sense of right.

It’s easy to look at other parenting styles and be critical, to point out flaws, or gossip about how backwards or crazy some decisions are. Instead, though, after our summer of guests, I’ve learned that each parent adopts the style he or she prefers and is almost destined to embrace, just as each writer adopts the style he or she prefers and is destined to embrace.

Sure, you could force writers to conform to a specific set of style standards with rigid requirements (e.g., never use pipes, always hyphenate e-mail, avoid the word “may” or “will,” never have more than 10 steps in a list, always format subheadings in 14px bold #333), but the effect may be just as stifling as requiring parents to conform to a specific style of parenting not their own (e.g., put your kids down at 7p.m., make them eat vegetables before dessert, avoid prolonged exposure outdoors, lock their bedroom doors at night, never tolerate impolite behavior, always braid their hair on Sundays).

Rather than criticize parenting styles different from my own, or writer’s styles different from my own, I am embracing a more open, relative philosophy (to some extent). In many cases, people adopt the style that matches their strengths, that fits in with a thousand impressions and influences that have shaped their perceptions, and which they feel most comfortable with. If you force people to go against their natural style, the result is often disastrous. We are most natural and productive using the style that fits us.

And yet, I’m not advocating extremism here. Two parents living in the same household have to be on the same general page in order to function as a team. One parent can’t adopt a disciplinary technique of spanking while the other parent doesn’t discipline at all. Just as one writer can’t start writing documentation in haikus while the other writes in novelesque form.

But the idea that a team has to be so uniform in their consistency down to an extremely granular level, such that they limit themselves from any experimentation, personal style, or best-judgment-for-the-situation decisions, is not a productive mindset. Customers don’t really care, and in the end, the breathing room writers feel will have tremendous payoff in their dedication and contributions to the team.

Blog Sponsors

Helpful Little Tips for Life

Tom Johnson — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 03:40:18 +0000

Today I bring you a random compilation of helpful little tips — for work, for home, or for dealing with kids, etc. — that I’ve learned in life.

If you’re tired at work, rotate tasks on the half hour to stay productive.
If you want to save money on toys, take your kids to a thrift store and let each child choose his or her own toy.
If your bath tub drains slowly, remove the plug and use a bent coat hook to pull out the endless hair that’s stopping it up.
If your kid is having trouble riding a bike, remove the pedals, lower the seat, and let the kid scuttle along until he or she is ready for the pedals again.
If your kids act like hooligans in stores, get a small umbrella stroller and let one of the kids push another kid (it keeps them occupied a bit more).
If you need better sleep at night, turn off all sources of light (light prolongs the body’s circadian rhythm) and sleep in total darkness.
If your kids resist having their teeth brushed, brush in the rhythm of a song (e.g., “monkeys up, monkeys down, monkeys left …”).
If you dread folding immense piles of laundry, pop in headphones and listen to a podcast while folding.
If you lose your cell phone, call it with Skype.
If you have writer’s block, immerse yourself in information from books, listservs, RSS feeds, and presentations.

And one bonus tip: If something is hard to do, do it every day.