The Parenting FastCast

https://medium.com/steveglaveski/book-summary-21-lessons-for-the-21st-century-by-yuval-noah-harari-73722006805a

 Today is part four of the series in which we analyze Yuval Noah Harari’s lessons from his book ’21 lessons for the 21st century’. We aim to change the culture we live in, for the better, through our children. And you, being a parent, have a direct role, a direct way to leave a legacy of positive change. Of course it turns out that being a parent, and effecting this change, isn’t easy. But listening to a 3 minute podcast is. So keep hanging in there with us and we’ll work on making it easier for you.

 Harari’s Chapter 15 is on Ignorance.

  This should be an easy one right? Ignorance is bad? Education is the great equalizer?

He writes: “scientists have demonstrated that most human decisions are based on emotional reactions and heuristics shortcuts rather than on rational analysis and that while our emotions and heuristics were perhaps suitable for dealing with life in the Stone Age they are woefully inadequate in the Silicon Age.”

No individual knows everything it takes to build a cathedral and atom bomb or an aircraft. What gave homo sapiens an edge over other animals was not rationality but our unparalleled ability to think together in large groups.”

So in the age of cavemen, we didn’t have a lot of people or science to expand our knowledge base. And you could make a case that today’s human also needs very little (or at least a very narrow) set of knowledge to survive well.

But when we’re raising small children, I’m going to have to work on cutting my kid a break for not knowing all of the answers to the questions. What we need to do is acknowledge that everything that is a fact, can be looked up. And what needs to be done by modern man is to lead. To lead others, to group all of the knowledge together; what we call a modern manager. That’s the key work of tomorrow.

In fact, chapter 19 states his opinion that “what kids really need to learn is adaptability, learning how to learn, resilience, curiosity, critical thinking, problem solving, and effective collaboration.

And there are some good teachers who have tried to solve this problem as woefully ineffective as any one person is: They tried to get people to organize information, vs learn it. And to think critically of information sources. That’ll be key moving forward.

https://medium.com/steveglaveski/book-summary-21-lessons-for-the-21st-century-by-yuval-noah-harari-73722006805a

 Today is part three of the series in which we analyze Yuval Noah Harari’s lessons from his book ’21 lessons for the 21st centry’. We aim to change the culture we live in, for the better, through our children. And you, being a parent, have a direct role, a direct way to leave a legacy of positive change. Of course it turns out that being a parent, and effecting this change, isn’t easy. But listening to a 3 minute podcast is. So keep hanging in there with us and we’ll work on making it easy for you.

 Harari’s third lesson, that I want to cover, is on Nationalism – and we’ll talk about what our children will think of America in the year 2080.

   The problem, Harari warns, starts when benign patriotism morphs into chauvinistic ultra-nationalism. Instead of believing that my nation is unique, which is true all nations, I might begin feeling that my nation is supreme.

And I have to stop and say that the Gen X and Geny parents and their schools have pushed this ‘supreme’ viewpoint. That’s on them. THEY didn’t create a better culture, in this respect. And baby boomers will never admit that, but they did. And it’s led to the rise of the USA isolating itself from the rest of the world.

So in 2080, what will your children think about Lagos Nigeria? I really don’t know. But there’s a good chance that America will need Lagos to help with things like global warming, and the global economy.

Will you raise children to be open minded about others? Who accept that other countries (and other people) are unique instead of inferior?  Will you raise children who can reach out to other countries to solve problems like famine, global warming, and vaccinations? I think we’ll need them to.

Harari writes: “We now have a global ecology, a global economy and global science but we are still stuck with only national politics.”

So while I had a podcast episode on not taking your small children on vacations when they’re young, I say take them on international vacations when they’re older. They’ll see that people are the same – everywhere.

https://medium.com/steveglaveski/book-summary-21-lessons-for-the-21st-century-by-yuval-noah-harari-73722006805a

 Today is part two of the series in which we analyze Yuval Noah Harari’s lessons from his book ’21 lessons for the 21st centry’. We aim to change the culture we live in, for the better, through our children. And you, being a parent, have a direct role, a direct way to leave a legacy of positive change. Of course it turns out that being a parent, and effecting this change, isn’t easy. But listening to a 3 minute podcast is. So keep hanging in there with us and we’ll work on making it easy for you.

 What is Harari’s 2nd lesson? The 2nd one that I want to focus on is the phrase:

Happiness = Reality — Expectations.

Happiness = Reality — Expectations.

And you can see this in various stories we’re told in the news, in books we read, by our friends.

Think of your richest friend. Or richest acquaintance/family member. Whom you may have heard say, “Our vacation to Hawaii wasn’t as great as we hoped it because it was cloudy”. Most of us are like, ‘boo hoo, I’d love to that problem.”

But it was the expectation of sunny beaches that made happiness elude them.

Now I’m a math kind of guy so I look at the equation and say if you want to maximize happiness you need to increase reality or decrease expectations.  It’s math.

And increasing reality is something that we all strive for. We take side hustles for more money, we buy 7$ Starbucks coffees, we fret over the right sofa fabric to match our living room décor.

But the richest bastards among us, the .1% ers – those people are some of the unhappiest, pill popping people that I’ve heard of. And even thoug “today’s poor live better than yesterday’s kings,” Americans are taking antidepressants in astounding numbers.

So setting correct expectations must be the answer. Without getting into more of my personal philosophy – it’s worked for me. But for your kids – at this age of 6 years old or so – we need to set the expectations for them. And as they get older we will have to help them figure out expectations for themselves. But for now, I will continue to tell my kindergartener, “Yes, you may play with your legos after you get dressed for school, and if there’s still time.” This sets the expectation that getting ready for school is priority and you are in control of your time if you get that done. Rinse and repeat – keep doing this setting of expectations for the drive home, choices for dinners, and bedtime routines. You’ll create a happy kid.

https://medium.com/steveglaveski/book-summary-21-lessons-for-the-21st-century-by-yuval-noah-harari-73722006805a

 It’s been a popular read; the book ’21 lessons for the 21st century’. The author is Professor Yuval Noah Harari. Professor Harari is an Israeli historian and author of a few other good books, including “Sapiens” a 2014 book that still has a 20 week wait at my library.

I think it’s always good to get an “outside the US” perspective. The world is a large place and it’s amazing what we blindly accept from our culture as concrete. That outside perspective is crucial to American parents thinking about which private pre-school we can get into, what photo package we need to buy for the third time this year, and how our car compares within the daycare parking lot.

Over the next 5 to 7 days I want to take some of the lessons that he believes are critical to this era. Because my belief is that we have the opportunity to change the culture (for the better), through our children, well that means we need to get educated on what culture we want to create. This series hopes to do that. So join with me over the next few days, share with an intellectual parent or two and see what Yuval has to say.

 His first lesson, chapter one, I normally would skip over.

   How can the chapter one title “Disillusionment” really relate to parenting? But my belief is that authors put their good stuff first – you have to grab attention. And he must be making a statement here with it.

In this first chapter, Harari makes the point that “humans think in stories rather than facts, numbers, or equations.”

And this is actually a central truth that is important to understand.

Back in episode 89 we talked about how Intuit cultures never scolded – but instead told a story about a kid who didn’t obey, got too close to the water and got sucked up into the belly of a sea monster. I tried something similar out with my kids and told a simple, very inaccurate story of a tummy monster and my kids tell me about it often! Stories are powerful.  Use them to your advantage – especially in parenting, but also in getting ahead at work – Use stories instead of yelling at your kids. Let’s say you disapprove of their slow eating. You can do something like leaning over to your husband/wife and telling him/her about a 5 year old you heard of who ate his breakfast so slow that he missed first recess because they didn’t make it to school on time. … Then you just let that sink in to your kid.

I know that invoking Louis CK isn’t going to win hearts and minds in this episode. In today’s PC world, marketers, and tv shows, and podcasts have a taboo on people whom the media has deemed monsters. But before all of that, there was a comedian whose insensitive view of the world was laughed at, and provided an alternate view of the world. If rock stars make music from drug induced creative sessions, comedians create their craft from effed up lives.

 So when I heard Louis CK say, “Kids have to insult another kids face to face to see how it feels.” They have to call someone a vulgar name right to their face. Because most of us normal people see that other person's face scrunch up as they feel hurt, and we say to ourselves, "ugh, that doesn't feel good".    And we stop being a bully all the time. It’s the human condition, this social situation that teaches us. And stopping it from happening – or pushing it to online interactions – ie: social media bullying – is actually making it worse.  You don’t get to see the other person is hurting on the other side of the Cat5 cable.

  Bullying is wrong. I’m understanding of that. I’m not condoning that. I’m saying that kids need to be kids. They need to learn social functions; by being social. So school won’t be a perfectly crafted experience for kids – no matter how much parents expect that. School won’t solve every personnel problem – no matter how much parents expect that.

  It reminds me of the Montessori philosophy: To “follow the child”. To let them work independently and allow for the joy of self discovery.

  Of course Montessorsi schools want you to think of all the utopian bliss that they offer – that’s what their selling. Unfortunately, it’s not all roses. Self discovery can mean calling another kid a nasty name. Just to see what happens.  Letting kids work independently means letting them fail. Following the child means they won’t meet state testing guidelines.

                And that’s parenting. That’s what you signed up for. Balancing between society’s new rules and letting your child figure it out, fail, and improve. Will you have the courage to do it?

First of all, I’m fascinated by how other people live. I will go to Walmart and see the eclectic dichotomy of Americans there and wonder – is this an accurate cross sections of America? I still don’t have an answer to that. Partly because of hope; I hope that’s not a cross section of America. And partly because there’s so many demographics targeted by Walmart.  But I’m always fascinated by what decisions the rest of America makes. And a few days ago I put out a podcast on ‘Live PD’; again, another view into “the rest of the world”.

 So another view of people is in the Bing Daily Polls. Bing is the Microsoft search engine. Their rewards program has a link you can click on every day to get a 1 question. 2 possible answer poll. You choose ‘A’ or you choose ‘b’.

   And it’s interesting because what I think are ‘definite’ answers – others may not agree with. That’s interesting. So this feedback loop, on what others think or prioritize can be very helpful to an introvert like myself.

Here are some interesting Q/A and my thoughts on them.

Which view would make you happier? Nature View or City View: 88% said ‘Nature’.

There are some things which are ingrained in us as humans. A connectedness with nature is one of them. The reasons, I’m sure, go back thousands of years. But the point is that we can probably help our children avoid the stresses of life; by sending them outside. Nature doesn’t have to be a mountain peak, it can be a city park nature trail. It could very well be a wooded lot with a tiny creek at the edge of your subdivision. So get your kids outside. Get them out often. Tell them to go outside and figure it out.

Which decade has better bands? The 70s or the 90s? 63% said the 70s.

This is interesting because I think it’s false data. Here I am espousing my love for polls and what it tells me about America. But this is important. You can’t believe everything you read. You have to understand the demographics. And 1) 70s band have been around longer and been listened to by more people. 2) The younger crowd is probably on google, or snapchat or something that’s not Microsoft Bing. The lesson here is to apply your own filter. Question everything. It’s a life and parenting skill that will take you far.

If you could remote control your life, which button would you use? 72% chose the rewind button. 28% pause button.

I’m amazed here. My wish as a kid wasn’t to fly, but was to pause time. So I’m so confused that 72% of the people chose the opposite. 72% tells me that adults must really look back at their lives and see room for improvement; to erase a couple of blemishes. But I’m reminded of the book “love and logic’s” points here: The repercussions of failing today are less than tomorrow. If the wish for a re-wind button is so strong in adults, then we need to let our children learn those lessons earlier vs later. A life of lessons learned early prevents this regret later in life.

 

That’s it for today. What kind of interesting things like this have you heard of? What surprised you about them?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/04/13/suicide-rates-prevention-white-men-american-dream-column/3448314002/

 

 We’ve spent the last few days talking about different angles of the boy crisis. Information in today’s podcast if from an opinion piece, I’ll link it in the shown notes.

Why is the suicide rate up 35% from 2000 to now? From 10.5 per 100,000 to 14. That may not seem like a lot, but heart disease kills 130 per 100,000 in a low state, and again- that’s every year – the Russian roulette revolver resets and strikes again, every year. So in a way, suicide is 10% as big a problem as heart disease. And heart disease is widely accepted as material.

 The article poses the question, “what happens if we don’t make a culture that is accepting of failure?”

Well, Randy Essex, of the Detroit Free press gives a story of

Roy Holloway, chaplain of the Aspen Volunteer Fire Department, operates an emergency suicide hotline. He put it this way to National Geographic: “The (ski) season goes by and people think, ‘I didn’t meet the girl of my dreams. I got laid off. I don’t have any more money. I’m embarrassed, and I don’t want to tell my family that I didn’t succeed.’”

 -So I live and broadcast from the American West. I live in a tourist town. And there are most definitely young men who follow this pattern of ski-slack-summer-slack-ski.  You see, we have a name for that time after the skiing and before summer, when you get laid off because work is often seasonal around here. It’s a real thing, it’s 100% common. And it’s one way our community gets through the ups and downs. We bring it out into the open.

Back to the article:

In Aspen or Detroit or little red-state towns like the one in which I grew up, it’s about how we measure failure and what we decide to do about it.

And that takes me back to my indictment of the American dream.

The idea that this nation affords each of us the opportunity to be whatever we want comes true for many, but certainly not all. Unspoken is the converse implication — especially for white men, born with advantages conferred by race and gender: If you can’t make it, it’s your fault and you are a failure.

So as a parent, we are in charge of creating the culture of the future. Explain the realities of the situation to your children when you can’t fulfil their every desire. Saying, “we don’t have unlimited money” or “there’s not enough time to get all that done”.  And find a story to tell them, about a co-worker, or family member, who has failed. And tell them that’s ok, and they are working on getting into a better situation, and they are still that funny uncle, or they are still your favorite neighbor. They still have value.

Don’t tell them that you’ll love them even if they fail. That should be implicit. You should be doing that on the daily and showing love, empathy should just be something that two people who love each other do.

Yesterday we tried to summarize the problem of boys and the biased expectations that a culture can put on them. And I want to take a side note here and say I do understand that women too have a different set of expectations, that have their own problems. I don’t discount that. It’s just not the focus of today. On one hand when we hear the phrase, “The future is female” – well some people may argue that it is in direct contrast to the other cultural idea that men should be a breadwinner – and that conflict is at the heart of the boy crisis.  But on the other hand, how do we think all those women felt in the 1950s when the future was totally male? Men were CEOs, Men were doctors, Women could have jobs as long as they did their second job at home. So I don’t feel a ton of sympathy here.

Ok, end of that side story. Todays podcast is on millennials.

 You see, this is where the conflict is playing out. Young millennials specifically, have a conflict.

  But first I want to highlight the SNL skit, “Millenial millions” where Keenan Thompson plays game show host to two millennials who can win big if they listen to boomers repeat some of their trite lines.

… and they played all the music, and did all the drugs, and had all the sex and went to college and got all the jobs and made all the money and bought all the houses and they won’t ever die. They’re the boomers!

And they get all that just for being born at the right time.

The problem is there’s a little truth in every joke.

My point is that we’re at the crossroads, as a society. This generation after Gen Y will be influenced by Gen Y aka: Millenials. And Gen Y is in a crisis about many things. I’ll give my take and a quick “Do or Don’t” // “good or bad” lesson on it.

Gen Y is crazy good at teamwork. Boomers think that you they raised themselves up by their bootsraps. They didn’t. – Lesson – Keep doing this. Keep encouraging teamwork and interaction.

Coddling: Gen Y was coddled. True story. And it directly contradicts with what praise as a culture. We praise Zuckerberg for “making it on his own”. We praise Steve Jobs for single handedly inventing the iphone (except he didn’t – that’s just a story). But Gen Y was raised in the best environment yet in the modern world. Ever.   So they got some parents that loved them and coddled them. The lesson – don’t do this. Let your kids fail.

Self Absorbed: Ever 59% of millennials described this generation that way. The lesson here. Get them off the phones. Away from an online world that revolves around them only. When they live in that world, it’s all they know how to do.

Creativity and social responsibility, concern for the environment: All good qualities of this Gen Y generation. Keep talking about those to your kids and we’ll at least have a head start on some of the other problems.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/04/07/males-risk-boy-crisis-identity-america-future-addiction-suicide-column/3331366002/

 

 They say there’s a boy crisis in America. Worldwide really. And I wasn’t sure I believed it. How could I? I mean, I raise two boys, I take them to school, I cook all the meals in the house, I am college educated, I have a successful job as a mechanical engineer. I’m aware to lead by example, I show up, I listen, I try to laugh.  But as so often is the case, we can’t see past our own noses. And if you research gender issues for a living, you rely on this thing called data. And that needs to be important in shaping both public policy and our personal opinions.

   And Dr. Warren Farrell has written many books on these kinds of things. And I’m not advocating agreeing or disagreeing with him. I don’t know enough, but I know that his data says, worldwide, “boys are 50 percent less likely than girls to meet basic proficiency in reading, math, and science.”

And it’s a crisis of education. It’s a crisis of mental health. It’s a crisis of fathering. It’s a crisis of purpose.

And I want to latch onto that last one. A crisis of purpose.

Even for the most open-minded among us, we don’t exist in a vacuum, we take our childhood and our schooling and it shapes us to this day. And even if I understand that men don’t have to be breadwinners, most every story read in my youth was of men being a warrior, a leader, a detective, an athlete, but otherwise a winner.

   It’s another case of environment creating reality. I’ve talked about environment before. It’s so important. If your environment is pizza and cookies – you’ll eat pizza and cookies. If your environment is Harry Potter stories (and you’re a young boy), you’ll expect yourself to be a hero who saves the world. People complain that there’s too much political correctness in the world, but a world where “Rad Women Worldwide: Artists and Athletes, Pirates and Punks, and Other Revolutionaries Who Shaped History” –that’s a book on lesser known history making women. A world where that’s required reading will actually do some good in the world. For all of political correctness problems – we must acknowledge that there are benefits too.

   So over the next weeks, months or years, don’t let others define your boy’s future. Reject the heroes of the past and show them the heroes of the present – whoever you think those are. Think female heroes.

   Another extremely simple step is to read some of the very popular stories by Ezra Jack Keats. Read the story of Peter and you’ll begin to see where the author’s life and commitment to anti-Semitism as the son of Polish-Jewish immigrants in Brooklyn, New York – shines through.

Charlie Munger, the business partner of Warren Buffett and Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, is famous for his quote “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.”

But it turns out that the even the jokes of super smart people are informative of how they think.

 It is not enough to think about difficult problems one way. You need to think about them forwards and backward.

  And as my son did his printable mazes the other day, he naturally started from the end when he got stuck. That was so cool to see.

And parenting is a problem unlike any other. It draws on so much of your biases. It draws on everything you’ve observed other parents doing. It draws on psychology and many other –ologys.

I think that parenting in the third person is a way to solve this problem backwards.

So think of a parent you respect or more preferably, one you don't. Ok, do you have his or her name in your head?

Then think of something your kid did today which drove you nuts. And think of how you handled it. Off the top of my head today I think of my son riding his bike and being all over the bike path, not just on the right side, away from traffic.

Then ask yourself how this parent that you don’t respect (I picked someone that I don’t think is an example parent). Think of how they would handle it. And don’t do that. Don’t be like that person.

For me, it helps me try to understand when I should be mad and when I shouldn’t. And back in the beginning of this podcast series, I mentioned how letting go of control is a good thing. I can’t sustain a life where I control every one of my child’s actions and reactions. First, that’s not feasible, and second, When I asked myself, “Am I doing this for control – or because it matters.” I often times came up with “control” as an answer. That’s not who I want to be. That’s probably what my nemesis would do. So I naturally try to do the opposite.