Listen. Do Wah Do. Do you Want to Know a Secret?

Why don’t your children listen? Here’s one possible answer: Maybe your kids are bad. Why not? It’s possible. Maybe deep down, they are just plain and simple, intrinsically B-A-D, bad, budding little rotten to the core psychopaths who, left to their own devices, would deliberately with malice of forethought, just refuse to listen because–stop me if I’ve mentioned this earlier in this paragraph–they are bad.

Maybe, to begin with mom, you should admit to your husband that you also dated a space alien with a red cape and a pointy tail nine months before your B-A-D son was born.

OK, I’m kidding. Not about who you may or may not have dated or what color cape he wore, but about the suggestion that your kids were born bad and are not listening because they are bad. Your kids aren’t bad.

So if they’re not just bad, why don’t they listen?

Here’s a thought (and this one is serious—no cape wearing space aliens in this sentence.) Maybe your kids don’t listen because you, their parents, keep telling them how to do every single, solitary little thing, no matter how minuscule, inconsequential, or unimportant. Maybe your kids are over it. The incessant, unceasing barrage of controlling words has forced them to build barriers to being receptive. Punch me in the nose often enough and I’m going to start putting my my hands in front of my face.

How would you like a boss who told you how to do every aspect of your job? How would you respond to a spouse who insisted that you be physically intimate every Tuesday and Thursday at 10:05 pm? Wouldn’t you agree that part of the joy of being alive is the ability to make choices, to determine your destiny, to finish your own sentences?

Your children would model how you live–if you would just hush up long enough for them to observe what your values are without being constantly harangued. All you’re doing by talking all the time is modeling anxiety. If you could relax, they could listen.

How are they going to be able to tell the difference between that which is life threatening–“Don’t take drugs”–and that which is trivial–“Do this worksheet for homework”? If your anxiety won’t allow you to tell the difference between critical and vacuous, how do you expect your children to be able to make that distinction?

No one would blame you for being anxious. Your community is a mess in ways that are new and worse, unprecedented really. Never before in history has a child had the opportunity to make such senseless, destructive decisions without guidance. Your children have access to that which is addictive and harmful in ways that previous generations did not. And they don’t have to go any farther than the neighborhood convenience store to start down the path to poor choices and poor health. Twinkies, lottery tickets, alcohol and—if you live in Colorado or California—marijuana, are readily available. Obesity, issues with gambling, alcohol and substance abuse are just down the street.

For Internet pornography, your children don’t even have to go all the way to the corner. Any computer in your home will take your 15 year-old to photographs and videos that would make you cringe.

What’s the answer for parents? How about a little good old fashioned silence? Combat the big things of which you disapprove by being quiet about the smaller things. Wait for the question.

But if I don’t tell him twenty times to get up and get dressed for school then he won’t get up on time and he’ll flunk his arithmetic test and he’ll fail the fifth grade and he won’t go to a good college and he’ll grow up to drink wine in the gutter.

I wouldn’t counsel against waking up an 11 year-old and telling him it’s time to go to school. But I do wonder why the child isn’t taking responsibility for setting his own alarm by that age. And if mom actually is going back to wake him up repeatedly, don’t you wonder if a change is called for?

So how do we get out kids to listen? How do we get them to comply? How do we get them to do what we know is in their long term best interest? The seemingly contradictory answer is that is compliance is what you’re after, the best you can hope to achieve is compliance. In the sense that if you go to bars to meet partners, the likelihood is that the partners you’ll meet will be partners who go to bars. Not that there’s anything wrong with bars, just that if you want to catch a trout, going fishing in a herring barrel in contraindicated.

The best parents I’ve seen over the years are the one who are content to just BE with their kids. (Pun intended.) Parents who wait for kids to ask a question before giving an answer do pretty well too. Or as a politician said in another context: “It’s the relationship, stupid.”

Take your kids hiking; let them choose a book and sit and read with them; take a walk with no destination, no agenda, and no time limit; sit in silence. Go toss a ball back and forth without speaking.

To paraphrase Yogi Berra who taught us that “Baseball is a fascinating game; you can see a lot of things just by watching,” I would suggest that your children are indeed anything but B-A-D and that you can hear a lot of things–just by listening.