Seems simple enough.  And entertaining.  Young women dancing provocatively.  Their booties ogled by a rapper type (Burger King’s stereotype).  Perfect way to sell the Kids Meal and Spongebob toy.  It is pure genius.  What the hell?

Hey, guess what parents?  Most of what your kids know, how they interact with the world, the veracity of what they say and do is largely based upon what they learn from you.  Whether it is genetics, imitation, observation or whatever, you are the beacon for how to live.  It is, I suppose, a practice what you preach thing but that sounds like a dumb cliche.

When asked how her son is doing, mom starts to say, “He’s doing fine” but then catches herself and says, “What am I saying.  He isn’t doing fine.  It has been a horrible week.  Two trips to the principal’s office and a lot of angry behavior at home.”  Now she is not saying this to the behavior police.  She is saying it to someone she is paying to help the family get better.  And her son is standing by her side.

What’s wrong with us?  Part of the human condition seems to be this limbo-land of half-truth.  Count the times during a given day when you water stuff down, use “diplomacy” as a reason to be less than honest, maneuver around the delicate egos of others, purposely decide you cannot tell the whole truth, actually practice deception.  I’ll bet it is a significant number.

For sure, we cannot just tell each other the unadulterated truth.  It would be too much to handle and we are not really cut out for it.  It does though put us in an interesting predicament when we are raising the children.  Should they believe what we tell them about how we expect them to live or should they believe what they see us do?  Talk about confusing.  When we are born, probably right after the umbilical cord cutting, we should be given a decoder ring.

Kids watch a lot of TV.  Way too much of the boob tube.  But allowing them to do whatever they want is seemingly the path of least resistance.  And of course we do not want resistance or conflict because that would require the hard work of change.  And we can’t have that because everything is going so well.

This blog is not about that… It’s about how adults are portrayed in TV commercials and how much kids get the message that we are idiots.  And parents are in the category of all adults so they are idiots also.  Parents kneeling under the roller coaster to catch spare change to pay for the family calling plan and anally-retentive rollover mom who saves all her minutes.  Then we have overweight dad riding his super-charged lawn mower to tackle a single lot yard.  And the ex-athletes who are so undisciplined that they have to have special meals delivered to their house in order to lose the extra 50 lbs.  Or the poor souls who are kidnapped and helped to get a good deal on a hotel room because they are too stupid to do it on their own.

It all seems simple and humorous and harmless.  It’s not.  It breeds disrespect.  The kids see it over and over again and it is reinforced in their minds that we are incapable, bungling, fat, lazy weirdos - even if we’re not.

Making the covert overt is a major parenting responsibility.  If I have an angry kid at home who deals with every disappointment, every occasion of not getting his way, every failed challenge, with anger and rage then how am I going to teach him to change?

The standard approach would be to talk with him after the blowup about how he could have handled things better.  He says he’ll try.  And this will be totally ineffective.

I could enroll him in an “anger management” group where he can be around other angry kids and learn to mask what is going on.  Talking a good game, mastering psychobabble and doing role plays will surely solve the problem.  Until, he encounters a real life situation that doesn’t go his way and out comes the rage again.

Or I could wait for the rage to happen because my boy runs into the unpredictability of life without entitlement  and recognize that I must fearlessly teach him the skills he needs to convert rage to something else that is more useful - right then, right there.  I must teach him the skills he will need while he is raging so the next time he is raging and I am not there, he will know what to do.

parentwarriors teach in the midst of chaos, confusion, rage and bedlam.  They are smart enough to know that the best time for their children to learn the lessons is when the volcano is erupting.

1) When your emotions are driving the car and your brains are in the backseat, you are halfway there.  Kids love family situations where parents are easily swayed by emotional impulses and the gray matter is missing in action.  It is fertile ground for manipulation, seduction, diversion and distraction.  The problem is that when the kids are out in the world, needing to make critical decisions, they end up on the short end or worse because mommy and daddy have not taught them how to think.  Then when something bad happens, M & D are upset.

2) When someone outside the family offers an honest appraisal about the nonsense going on at home that passes for family norms, and the family defense system clicks in and shoots the messenger from the sky.  Burning up your allies is the other half of a dsyfunctional existence.  It ends up with mutual assured destruction where family members get no feedback and suffocate on their own recycled patterns of behavior.  Clinging to the piece of wood in the middle of the ocean seems like a good idea (maybe the only idea) at the time.  But at some point, when you’re not paying attention, the waterlogged salvation becomes the anchor that carries you to the bottom.

I read an article in a St. Louis paper about parenting oppositional kids written by an accomplished therapist and educator.  It was great advice about basic ways parents could intervene with oppositional defiant kids.  What the article missed, what most articles miss, is how this behavior gets set up in the first place.  It missed the complexity of families, the subterranean happenings, the unspoken communications that overshadow whatever is being said and done on the surface.  It missed the essence of what is really going on and the fact that those behaviors are weaved into the fabric of the family.  So all the great intervention strategies will work for awhile and then they will stop working.  The situation will become worse than before the interventions were tried.

Here is what is going on in the underbelly: 1) Parents who need to be loved by their children and the children who know this.  The kids know that by giving their parents the love they so desperately need they will have a special place.  Parents end up as willing victims of extortion with the kids demanding more and more by holding love hostage.  When parents finally wake up and say “no” to this bizarre arrangement, usually for the wrong reason (like the price is too high), they are told by their entitled children that there is no escape or rescue.  If parents hold their ground and stop fulfilling demands, it is then that the oppositional defiant behavior begins.  2) Parents who sabotage each other by giving kids mixed communications.  It could be that one parent is the disciplinarian and the other is the “nice one” who never follows through with enforcing any consequences.  Or it could happen with grandparents usurping parents; misguided professionals taking the side of kids without knowing the whole story; the media telling kids that parents are idiots.  This breeds mutiny where oppositional behavior escalates and can turn violent.  3) Emotional incest where parents literally become friends with their children thereby breaking down all boundaries, the natural order of parents raising their kids and ending any possibility of effective parenting.  Friends do not have authority over each other and if, by chance, a parent decides to be the parent the kid-friend says this is not going to happen.  It is a small step to outright anarchy.

Suggestions for interventions are sometimes useful but they are just band-aids that do not address what is going on below.  It is the malignancies that we must face, sooner or later.  That is the true test of wanting a healthy family.

After 27 years of doing mental health counseling and life coaching, I’ve lost count of how many adults erupted in sessions when they realized that no one in their life had ever expected the very best from them.  No one, not even their parents, loved them enough, cared enough to push them to become somebody.

Their conclusion: Something is wrong with me.  I’m not good enough.  I don’t deserve to be successful, to be loved.  I have no real place or purpose in the world.  I do not really matter.

The ultimate disrespect is to expect too little…

Although it is not a laughing matter, I see it so much that I can’t help but smile at the tragic-comedy unfolding in the 21st century.  Kids, in all different settings, treating their parents like doormats on whom they wipe their feet without thought or regard.

The more puzzling part is parents allowing this to happen on a continuous basis. What’s up with that?  What are they thinking will result from this?  Does it buy them some alliance with the kid or is it simply weakness, insecurity and fear?  With footprints all over their minds, bodies and spirits, it seems counter-productive to raising healthy kids.

And it sets kids up for disaster when they go out into the world believing every adult will allow themselves to be walked upon with total disrespect.  This is not how the world works and many of us adults will not put up with this kind of dysfunctional behavior from your punk kid.  The kid will be stunned and eventually angry with you for teaching them a fairy tale version of reality.  Of course, by the time they figure out you set them up, you will have created some cute rationalization for your behavior.

Bottomline: Allowing your kids to walk all over you is a losing proposition for everyone.

We love to compare our present performance to what we did in the past.  “I’m doing better than I did last year.”  It stinks.  And it is a lousy comparison.  It allows us to dumb ourselves down and then that becomes the baseline.

The measuring stick needs to be: what am I capable of doing at my very best (my potential) and how far away am I.

Parents often ask, “How long will it take to change?”  My response: “Add up the number of weeks it took to get like this.  Divide by ten and that is the shortest time.  Multiply by ten and that is the longest time.”

Behind the question is the desire for a quick and speedy recovery.  A natural byproduct of our current society, I suppose, that expects immediate relief and has no patience for process and incremental progress.  Never mind that the family situation is sometimes a reflection of generations of unsolved problems.  We just want it to be different - now.

Often the current life of the family is presented as if family members just woke up one day and there it was.  Patterns of dysfunction, anger, depression, scattered thoughts, impulsivity, disengagement, upside down hierarchy, addiction, distress and all manner of unhealthy interactions.

When family members are asked how they arranged all this, they look confused, even insulted.  “What do you mean?”, they say, with a huffiness that is almost aggressive.  What I mean is, “How did you all arrange for it to be like this?”

It is not an accusation.  It is a question that asks family members to consider the possibility that the current mess is something they are responsible for and capable of fixing.  It didn’t just happen.  And it is not going to just get better.