This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
Do you ever get the feeling your kids don’t listen to you?
You’re not imagining things, it’s scientific fact: Newton’s 3rd Law of Utterance: For every action there is an equal and opposite “Huh?”
Baby animals listen to their mommies and daddies. I suppose it’s not vital among human offspring as we rarely need to alert our babies to the fact that they are about to be eaten. If that were the case, they’d be dinner, because human children instinctively deflect verbal discourse with their parents.
We are, therefore, constantly devising strategies to increase the chances that what we say is heard. I can now sing “clean your rooms before I send you to Juvenile Detention Center” to the exact melody played by the ice cream truck. It’s a hard one for them to ignore, I can tell, because of the way they hurtle past me, just this side of hysterical, because they think I’m singing along to the ice cream truck, not pretending to be the ice cream truck. To get their attention, I am leveraging the fleeting nature of the ice cream man whose very presence means he’s always seconds from pulling away. This trick gets their attention. They pause in their frenzied exodus to ask me for cash.
Parents are taught that consistency and stability is critical for children. Unlike the flighty ice cream man, we must radiate our unconditional presence. As a constant, the children may rest assured that we parents and our entire to-do list will, sadly, be right here until the very end of time. Wholly overlookable, like laundry and leftovers. And falling Mommy Trees.
Recall the philosophical question about the tree falling in the forest. It addresses perception, i.e. if there is nobody around to perceive the sound made, does it qualify as having made one?
What about when every kid I have and some that aren’t even mine are right there when I make a sound but they didn’t hear it. Did I speak?
There are people who would argue, that because they didn’t hear any words, they must not have been spoken. The implication being that they didn’t know to pick the wet towel up off the bathroom floor because they didn’t hear anyone ask them to do it. Evidently, I really am talking to the walls. Or am I?
Let’s examine the following hypothetical situation:
A Mommy falls in the forest, and every single one of her children is there to hear it. Did she make a sound?
**For this example, let’s imagine she is falling off a Werner 24 foot aluminum extension ladder that she has climbed to pick up the dirty dishes left by a teenage bird in a tree.)
In fact, on the way down, she exclaimed at first teeter, “Oooh oh! Wha--the fu---- uuuu-------!” As the teeter became more of a drop, she then hollered for help, followed by a horror-stricken wail as she mentally fast-forwarded to the kids finding her in a heap and having to dial 911, not knowing if she was dead or alive. Then the mommy pealed out another call for help, a couple of whimpers of searing pain, and finally just screamed the rest of the way down. When she at last hit the forest floor with a thunderous “WHUMP” that reverberated off yonder mountains and triggered car alarms for miles in all directions, each child glanced up. One asked “Mom! Where are my shoes?” And they all returned to what they’d been doing.
Nope. No sound made.
Sometimes I want to bang on the glass that surely must be muting all noise between my world and my kids’. I am the greasy-fingered tourist shouting and pawing at the aquarium tank glass and they are the slack-jawed eels sliding by, ignorant of my beseeching appeals to do something. Anything. Oblivious, they slither past. It just doesn’t do to repeat myself in a louder voice if the content of what I am announcing is not related to a Flaming Hot Cheetos blizzard scheduled to blow through our neighborhood in exactly four minutes.
Occasionally, a kid will make the effort to appear to be making an effort. As inept as they may be at learning Spanish or French, this linguistic application seems to come naturally. Easy to pronounce, it’s a simple distraction that can be made to sound as if they didn't quite catch what you said and they are keenly interested in having another chance. It’s pronounced ‘What?’ (Wh-ut) and for the professional, is punctuated by exiting the room at exactly the same time.
You can test the skill level of your own children with any presently in earshot. What you ask of them is irrelevant. “Sweetheart would you mind sweeping the chimney?” Or, “Could you blow out the sprinkler system?” “Count this lint?” Usually the intended recipient of the request has issued the “what?” and skeetered away long before you’ve finished asking them if they would please run out back and mine for iron ore.
Another handy strategy employed by crafty kids is to acknowledge a request immediately and positively. When a parent says “I need you to sweep the kitchen please,” in response and without a moment’s hesitation, the child agrees: “Okay!” The first time can stop a parent in their tracks. “Did he just say ‘Okay?’ ” To me? At which point the parent might follow that exchange with a ‘thank you,’ an indication of a conversational volley concluded, a deal struck. But now stop talking. That interaction is over you are a distant memory. So is the thing you were so heartily assured would get done.
My first time I thought “YES! See, this right here is some goood parenting.!” I did the Awesome Jig. Congratulated myself for being one of the Chosen mommies, envisioned laundry piles parting for me. “I mean, if I’m honest,” I rejoiced in my head, “I am a bit of a savant when it comes to parenting, probably should consider a lecture series, or at least a shout out to Parenting magazine.”
By the fifth or sixth time of “CTT” (“Can’t Touch This”), the dead easiness of this asked-and-answered scenario might smell fishy. Mine did, when I realized that I’d never actually checked to see whether the child did what he’d so readily agreed to do. I went on a scavenger hunt. Clean clothes? Still in laundry basket. Bathroom trash? Still there. Cat pee pillow? Still stinkin’ there. Cups and glasses in the bedroom? He could open a bar.
Like any good parent in a constant battle to outwit her children, I have taken the Love & Logic course and I know that effective communication requires that both parties walk away with a win. ie., I needed to sweeten the deal. Next time, I’d offer, “As soon as you put your clean clothes away you can watch YouTube.” Presented with this sequence of events, he will opt to do the chore so that he may reap the reward. What really happens is that the child delivers a 38-minute thesis on why the clothes don’t need to be put away now, by him, or at all. He concludes that by virtue of you having displaced the clothes from the basket in the first place, you should put them away. That level of logic is not covered in the beginner course I took. Evidently that is Ninja logic for which you sign a release of liability waiver beforehand and pay a higher fee.
The most laughable tactic of our dear youth, is behaving as if they’re in a hurry whenever you attempt to exchange information greater than a sound byte. These people gauge time like groundhogs, yet manage, with twitching and facial tics, to appear as if they are due in surgery that second. Anything you share in the midst of a full-on facial convulsion will fall on deaf ears. It was something about the family moving house and it will only be vaguely recalled the following week when the kid arrives from school to find their house, their living room, their XBox and their Cheetos taken over by a different family.
Ironic to the harried lifestyle they like to portray is the way they themselves speak. You may have noticed that ‘Like’ is the new, um ‘word.’ While these guys may be unbelievably (we don’t believe it, actually) pressed for time, they will take an agonizingly long span of it to say anything. An exchange between two or more of their kind, minus the “likes,” can be summed up, as ‘one person said a funny thing and the other laughed.’ Six seconds. The story retold takes 11 minutes. Meanwhile, here I am feeling pressure to say things quickly and in their language. I need to convey real information in the same vague and noncomittal way they do, meandering around facts and actualities in the narrowest window of time before pressing commitments whisk the harried groundhog off to his next frivolity. I’m pretty good at it, I think.
‘So, um, like, how was school? Are you like, ready like for your uhh test tomorrow?”’
‘Can I get my hair colored?’
It could be said that the majority of parent-child interactions center around adult favorites like chores and bathing, room cleaning and dentist appointments. They know, somehow even as you think of opening your mouth that they are about to be recruited for slave labor, which is their cue to dive under a couch. When did they become so perceptive? How long after the egg is fertilized does the child begin to discern the tone of voice mommy uses when she’s about to engage someone in sweatshop servitude? While there, they must also have studied their siblings’ reactions to mom’s recruiting activities. Because they emerge knowing that the first four requests can be ignored outright. Six through 10 can be swiftly laid to rest with the appearance of immediate compliance. “You got it, Mom!” After 10, well, anything after 10 can justifiably be classified as “nagging” at which point the child is fully entitled to counter-nag, possibly suggesting, “You don’t have to get mad about it!”
Mad? Nobody is mad. Again, we can defer to scientific fact: An explosion is the direct result of the application of indifference (total apathy) applied to a rational entity (adult human) which then erupts in excessive heat, gas and bellowing. While the smoke clears, the child who’d attempted earlier to claim he never heard you ask him to clean up the cat vomit will now summarize the extent of the nagging he’s been made to endure, ‘You already asked me! Like 14 times!’ Ninja logic strikes again.
Astonishingly, they think we don’t listen to them. So they too, plot ways to be heard above the adult noise. The choice of material is only made worse by the acute level of detail applied to the narrative, which is generally the recounting of a dream, a play-by-play of a YouTube video, movie or video game, or the 3rd-hand account of some schoolyard drama involving more characters than a BBC mini-series. We’re a captive audience, given that the assault comes while we are: a) in bed b) on the business side of a locked bathroom door, or c) already talking - on the phone with someone else.
Never-the-less, we are meant to stand patiently by while they lose their train of thought, answer phone calls and take the odd time out to annoy a nearby sibling. Add the likes, the ums, a pause to get a drink and return a text message and you’re cancelling meetings for the next day. It’s a lopsided equation for sure, whereby we parents loiter about in the background like pound puppies waiting for the chance bit of attention only to get passed over time and again. Then, on our luckiest day, we are treated to an uncut recap of a teen boy’s most recent foray into online hooliganism and debauchery Black Ops style.
Charles Schultz nailed it in his Charlie Brown cartoons where never-seen adult characters spoke in indecipherable “wa waaa” sounds. This is actually what our children hear when we speak. And it begs the question, how did anyone manage to enforce that classic code of behavior, “Children should be seen and not heard.” The reality, from my observation, is the other way around, except I’m pretty sure our children would note that “Um, like parents? Should like totally um, not like be seen. Or like heard.”
