Allo!

My family and I enjoyed hosting Cornelius, a 15 year-old exchange student from Northern France, once we got over our nagging concern that we did indeed have the right child from the right country. “They all speak English fluently,” my thoughtful wife was told at the orientation meeting at the school. “Perfectly.” My wife even wrote down the word “perfectly” so that she wouldn’t forget and so that she could impress on me that Cornelius wouldn’t be a problem to communicate with during his stay.

“What’s one more kid?” I agreed. “Two weeks is fine.”

Of course, as anyone who has ever watched congressional hearings can attest, sometimes the most simple, straightforward concepts can be the squirmiest to pin down. Cornelius was most certainly able to communicate a few critical phrases including “Allo!” and “I not understood” but was lost with some of the more abstract concepts that we throw around in our erudite home. The words for “chicken,” “fork,” and “vegetable,” for example, were all beyond his imperfect proficiency. And I shudder to think what might have happened had the concept of dividing fractions come up in conversation at the dinner table

Of course even Cornelius’s stumbling English was superior to my limited ability to communicate in French. Indeed, I only know a few words and, as there seemed no reason for me to mention either “Dom Perignon” or “Bridgette Bardot,” conversation was necessarily limited. “Allo!” Cornelius would brightly greet me several times each day. “Invert the denominator and multiply” I was tempted to respond.

Finally the children gracelessly pointed out what they had known all along: our smart phones were smarter than we and could translate impeccably from French to English and back again. After this discovery, we all had a pretty good time. I don’t remember the French words for “volleyball,” “canoe,” and “Dairy Queen” but the visit seemed to work out pretty well and the two weeks passed quickly.

Which brings me–“finally,” you might say–to my insight about parenting for this week.

How would you know if what you were saying to your kids wasn’t being ‘heard’? How would you know if you might as well be speaking a foreign language? Remember what Charlie Brown hears when the teacher speaks in the televised cartoons? “Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.” How do you know that when you say, “How was your day at school?” that your child doesn’t hear, “Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah”?

One clear indication might be getting an answer that you can’t translate–even with your smart phone–or that you know not to be true. Everybody knows the terrible joke about the guy who makes a “Freudian Slip” at dinner: His mother says, “Please pass the potatoes” and he responds, ‘You ruined my life, you f***ing wrench.'”

When you ask your kids every day what their grades are and they say they’re doing fine but you know darn well that their grades are not at all what you would prefer, maybe what they’re trying to say is “I not understood.” There is certainly a serious disconnect somewhere.

More gently put, if you’re asking your kids how they’re doing in school and the answers don’t make sense, ie, “Everything’s great” or “we didn’t have any homework and anyway I already did it,” maybe you’re not asking the right questions.

Maybe you’re not even speaking the same language.