Scoundrels put flowers on our doorstep

Today I had an amusing experience with some of the kids in our neighborhood.


A couple of days ago someone left flowers on our doorstep and my wife and I thought it was our children. But today it was revealed that the flowers had been left there by someone else. Someone unexpected. We were in the kitchen getting ready for lunch (today is a holiday in Denmark) and the door bell sounded. Out the window we could see some girls running behind a wooden fence to hide. They were about 13-14 years old and we knew they had to be the ones who rang the door bell.


Now, I could´ve gotten angry and told them never to do such a thing again. To be honest: if I´d been in a bad mood, that might just have been my chosen course of action. But really, what would that have accomplished for anyone?

So, instead I did something they certainly didn´t expect as far as their faces could tell. I swooped the door open and ran out yelling at them: "I´ll get you for this!" and coming round the fence, I saw three surprised teenage girls, when I said in a kind manner: "You didn´t expect this, did you?" At first, they were speechless, which in itself is quite the accomplishment when dealing with giggly teenage girls in my experience. But then one of them looked at me with a smile and said: "Did you like the flowers?" Flowers? I had rushed so fast out the door that I actually hadn´t seen the flowers they´d put on our doorstep and now it was my turn to be surprised. "Oh, you are the ones who are putting flowers on our doorstep. Sorry, I didn´t see them. But hey, if you´re going to be mischievous, this is the way to do it! Thanks for the flowers, you scoundrels!"


I had a big smile on my face and so did the girls. What a great way to start a holiday!

How did you start your holiday?

Building blocks of a human being - Definitions

This post is a follow up on my previous posts on how you can raise your children without spanking them and do a much better job at it!


In a way, I am skipping a step, but this is necessary for me to make a very important point regarding some of the terms I´ll be using in coming posts. These terms are:


#1: Self Awareness
#2: Self Esteem
#3: Self Confidence


These three are the building blocks of any human being and have tremendous influence on your behavior as a person. But quite often we mix them together.


Quite often I hear people speak of Self Esteem and Self Confidence as if they were two words explaining the same thing. This is a mistake. These two are to some extent intertwined, but if you want your children to grow up as strong and kind adults, you need to get the difference between them.


I´ll be going deeper into these three terms in some of the coming posts, but for now I´ll define them like this:

#1 Self Awareness
Being self aware is an ability that separates human beings from animals. Self Awareness is a necessity for us to know who we are. It´s what makes us understand how we are like other people and how we are different from other people. Without Self Awareness we will separate us from ourselves and never be able to be anything else than biological machines. Our existence depends on our self awareness, because without it we are like robots not choosing anything, but just following the crowd.


#2 Self Esteem

Self Esteem is often confused for Self Confidence, but Self Esteem is much more important than that. Self Esteem is basically built on our Self Awareness our surroundings being the builders. Your mum and dad are the primary Self Esteem builders and how they act can either build up your Self Esteem or tare it down. Self Esteem is high when you understand that you have a basic right to be who you are. Self Esteem is built when others acknowledge and confirm your emotions. I´ll be going much deeper into this in another post, because it very important to understand the difference between acknowledging your emotions on one hand and accepting your actions on the other. These two: acknowledgement and accept are NOT the same!

#3: Self Confidence is a picture of the moment
Self Confidence is closely connected to your most recent past. Your successes and failures not too long ago has a major impact on your Self Confidence. This means that while a strong feeling of Self Confidence is important when you need to perform, such as priming an exam or hooking a major client for your company, Self Confidence is very fragile and the smallest failure can brake it down easily if there is nothing else to hold you up. The reason for this is that Self Confidence has to do with your skills. What you have recently achieved or failed at determines your Self Confidence.

Your turn. Share, ask, comment. Do you feel self confident?

A family project

Remember when I talked about the trampoline in our garden a few days ago? I was giving you some insight in some of the play things we have in our garden and I told you that they are being used by both our own kids and the kids in the neighborhood...

Now, it doesn´t look like much today. It´s been well used and of course it wears. Still, this trampoline is one of the most important play things at our place. Not only because it´s the one thing the kids use most and not only because it´s one of the favorites among the neighborhood kids. Not even the fact that it gives our children the opportunity to train their body and their balance is what makes this toy have a special places in our hearts.


No, this toy is special to us because we´ve built something together as a family. Not the trampoline in itself, it came in a package and all we needed to do was to assemble the parts and bits. But for safety reason´s we dug it down as you can see in the picture. We did this as a family. Everyone took part in it and did their part. Even our youngest, who was at the time only three years old, did his job digging it down.


This is how we did it:


My wife and I took shifts with the shovel in the hole and put the dirt in buckets, which were then placed on the ground. Two or three children at a time would then bring the buckets to our trailer cart where my wife or I would empty the buckets and the children brought the bucket back to the hole to be refilled.


Most of the time our youngest boy, knowing he wasn´t strong enough but stubborn enough to not wanting to admit it, would be in the hole with my wife or myself picking up stones in a smaller bucket and bring them to the trailer.


The project was finished after three days and since we all did our part in it, that trampoline has a special place in our hearts.

Dictator or Father?

- raising kids is a discipline in itself

In my latest post about raising children, I was talking about the strange notion some people have that violence is not only a way to raise kids, but that it is needed to maintain discipline and respect. I was (I hope) very clear on this point: spanking is violence! Violence is a no-go!

Today I want to present an alternative to spanking. Or rather, I want to present an idea of what disciplining your kids really means. Remember, spanking is a no-go AND - very important! - IT DOESN´WORK! All you will achieve by spanking your kids is alienating them and making it impossible for you to help them in their adult life.

If you spank your kids, you won´t be able to share your wisdom and experience with them, neither when they are kids, nor when they are all grown up; because the day they leave your house to go live for themselves is the day your influence is declared null and void!

So, what to do, if violence doesn´t work? Do we not need some kind of power as parents? Some kind of leverage to get our kids to do right?

Force is a tool for change, not learning

Well, yes... - and no! - The basic mistake is this: the use of power is not - and I repeat: NOT IN ANY WAY - a tool for teaching your children anything. And I really mean *anything* - the use of power is a tool to get their attention, nothing more, nothing less. That makes power the last tool to grab from your parenting tool box, not the first or even the 10th.

I also need to emphasize that mentioning 'the use of force,' I´m not just talking about spanking. I´m talking about every and all uses of force, that is: any kind of action, where you as a parent use your power to make your kid do (or not do) what he/she doesn´t want to (or want to) do!!!

I just stated that the use of force doesn´t teach your children anything in itself. The reason is quite simple. No person in this world can truly learn anything important, if it is not learnt by heart. That is: true learning is not something going on in your brain. It´s not knowledge alone, it has to be combined with what you might call wisdom. It´s not a coincidence we use the term 'learning by heart' because really learning is about taking the knowledge in and implementing it in your life - willingly!

Let me give you an example from the adult world:

When ‘the coalition of the willing’ invaded Iraq, some of the most hard core politicians genuinely thought they could force Iraq into modern day democracy. Did they succeed? I think not... But! - what really *was* a success was the fact that a democracy was born from the ruins.

Not a democracy like we know it in the western world, but this is where we should remember that our democracies weren´t exactly free democracies in their childhood either. For instance, it wasn´t till the 20th century women were eligible for governing organs and neither did they have the right to vote in most western democracies before 1930 (in fact, the final canton in Switzerland to give women the right to vote didn´t till 1984!)

Iraq began its journey toward democracy following the invasion, but the Iraqi people have to find out the rest for themselves...

The same goes for children. You cannot force upon them the complete understanding you have gained from experience. They need to figure it out for themselves. But what you *can* do is force them to stop for a moment and think. And when they stop to think, they just might come to the conclusion that it is better to start listening to you.

Here there is something very, very important to understand about the use of force: you have to let go of that tool as soon as you see them stop and think. If you don´t, you shift the focus for learning from 'learning best way' to 'learning how to make mum and dad happy.' 

I probably don´t have to say this, but I´ll do anyway: This is just as useful in the discipline of raising kids as Burgers and fries as the main meal is good for your health.

The use of force is ONLY to be used as a wakeup call, nothing more. If you continue the use of force after they start to listen, you will force the child to replace their own thinking with an escape plan: ‘how can I get mum and dad to like me again?’ And this is never good.

Instead, as soon as you see the child stopping to think, let go of the power. Give the kid a chance to make up his/her mind and figure out that the best course of action right now is to listen.

Fear the right thing

My second point is about fear. Having a basic understanding that children are human beings with less experience and equally valuable to any adult, the intuitive understanding of fear is that if the kid experiences fear, it can never be a good thing... However, it´s a bit more complicated than that.

All human being experience fear and in modern society fear is one of the most common barriers for success. Fear can make us hide when we need to stand tall and fear makes us bend to other people´s will, when we need to make up our own minds. For those reasons (and many more) the popular understand is that fear is, per definition, ‘bad’ - but really that´s not the case. Fear is neither bad nor good. It´s how we react to our fears that determines good or bad.

My father-in-law was a farmer and the first time I entered the stable I had somewhat of a chock. The sight of 50+ milking cows´ rear end lined up on each side of me made me freeze right there on the spot. This was new to me and I was struck with fear, because I didn´t know how to handle these animals. Fear made me cautious; a good thing. My response to this fear was to observe, how my father-in-law handled the cows and little by little, I learned how to handle them as well.

I feared the cows and looked to my father-in-law to learn how to handle them and this is exactly what your children need to do in their lives: they need to understand that listening to you and observing how you do things can benefit them.

In other words: if your kids fear you, it´s a bad thing - but if your kids fear not listening to you, it´s a good thing!

Let´s sum up this post:

#1 - Force is a tool for change - As a parent, if you want your children to learn from you, power is to be used with caution. You cannot force your experience upon them and if you try, they won´t gain any wisdom. They will only become experts in making mum and dad happy. And even more importantly (though this is not very clear in the above due to my wish to economize writing space) if you try to force your experience on them, their focus will be on weither mum and dad loves me or not as opposed to mum and dad knowing best.

#2 - Fear the right thing - The use of power is a tool for getting the attention of your kids, but it´s important to let go of that tools as soon as you reach that goal - if you don´t, your kids will fear *you* instead of fearing their surroundings and look to you for help and wisdom. However, using force in the above mentioned way, you can get their attention and as they experience over and over again, what happens if they don´t listen to you, they will learn that one important lesson: listen to mum and dad, because they have been around for some time and most of the times, they have a few things to teach me.


For a tool using these principles, see this

Now, it´s your turn.  Do you have experience you want to share?

How to spank your wife

- tough love well practiced

Does the title of this post sound awkward to you? Perhaps it even makes you a bit angry? If it does, you´ve already gotten half the point, I want to make in this post. So - lean back in your chair, grab a cup of coffee or whatever beverage you prefer while reading important stuff (if you don´t want to get up yourself and get it, your wife is there for the same reason, isn´t she? - or not...)

Every once in a while, the question of how to discipline your children comes up in public debate and one of the most stunning (at least to me) claims is that if you won´t spank your kids, you´re actually doing them wrong. The argument by promoters of this statement is that without spanking, there´s no discipline. People insisting this to be true, thus see spanking and disciplining children as two sides of the same coin.

I strongly disagree!

To make my point, I´ve used the above title for this post as a imaginary pair of glasses giving a broader perspective. Imagine if someone, in all seriousness, claimed the same argument for marriage - or any other relationship for that matter: that the only way a man can ‘get some respect around here’ is to have a loose wrist and a trigger happy fist.

So, if the wife won´t get you a beer, slap her in the face; If your friend doesn´t want to lend you a hand with something, punch him on the nose; And if your children misbehave, grab one of them by the legs and use the kid as a baseball bat to slap his brothers and sisters around the house - yieehaa! A home run!

Doesn´t sound all that sound now, does it? But for some strange reason, many parents still believe that spanking your child is good for them. It will grant you the respect you deserve and need to discipline them well.

I hate to be the one to point this out (well, not really!) but if there´s one fact of life when it comes to friendship, love and relationships, be that between equals or between people whose distribution of power is unequal, it is this:

Respect comes and goes according to how it is dealt out!

So, if you believe your kids to have respect for you as a result of spanking them, you´re deluding yourself: you are confusing respect for fear - or said more to the point: Your kids do not respect someone, who slaps them around, they fear them! Exactly in the same way as your wife or your friends will fear you for violent behavior...

If you are sitting there, thinking that 'this guy has no clue' maybe you should read my post on Parental Blessings, where I tell about what our children did for my wife and me a couple of days ago. There you will see, that perhaps our methods of raising kids is not all that bad!

Now that we have that one parked, let´s look at what raising your children really means:

First and foremost, raising your children means exactly that. Raising means to lift up, that is: encourage, bringing up the best in them, praising them, enforcing their self esteem and building their self understanding and sense of themselves. In the past, raising children for most parents meant to indoctrinate, more or less, so that they would do what was expected of them, instead of making up their own minds. This only result in adults who cannot make their own decisions, but rely on others to decide for them. Is this what you want of your kids?

Secondly, disciplining is not about brute force. Many parents treat their children as animals to be trained. This view is thinking of children as entities becoming human as they grow up, instead of human beings with less experience. This way of thinking is directly derived from the above statement about the main base of raising children. If you have the first view, you will grant your children favors and rights when they do what you want them to and take these grants away when they do the things you don´t want them to do. While this may sound appealing, the problem is that using this principle, your kids will never learn what is right and wrong, but only what makes mom and dad happy or angry. Is this really what you want?

As a parent, you will need the latter view. Kids aren´t animals needing to learn which behavior they earn goodies by and which behavior makes daddy angry and hit you.

Instead, what they need is to learn from your experience. In the coming days, I will elaborate on how to use discipline in raising children. For now, I just want to point out one final thing:

Thirdly, raising children and disciplining them are two different things! Disciplining are the means you use to get your child’s attention, that is: to use leverage as an adult and a parent ‘opening a door’ to connect with your children, so that you can raise them. Raising, however, is your goal. Raising is what you want; disciplining is one among many tools to achieve that goal.

So, to sum up this post:

As a parent, I want to raise my children in a manner that will better their chances of success in life. This is my goal: success for my children!

Having this goal, I must understand that my children are first and foremost human beings and as such they are every bit as valuable as I, their father. Spanking my children does not comply with this view. If I wouldn´t spank my wife or beat up my friends to get them to obey me, I wouldn´t spank my children for the same reason, unless I view them as lesser beings. I don´t. I view them as equals in terms of value and being human. And therefore I won´t spank them, because it goes against one of my basic values: that children are as valuable as I am.

To achieve my goal: succes for my children, I use various tools in raising them. Disciplining them is one of these tools, but it´s neither the only tool, nor is it the most important one.

And finally, using brute force in disciplining will not achieve the goal: success for my children. It´ll only teach my children to obey me, but they will never learn the benefits of listening to my wisdom, so when they grow up and start a life of their own, my influence is null and void! As soon as I see them leaving their childhood home, I can only help them succeed, if I´ve chosen a better way than brute force.


More about this subject here

Now, it´s your turn.  Do you have experience you want to share?