Why I Will Not Go Back to Applebees Anytime Soon

This is an example of what happens when decisions are made
at the corporate level without local feedback.

My family had a particularly unpleasant night at Applebees the tonight. Going out to dinner with a three year old is always an interesting experience, but we can generally manage things and keep The Koalid entertained. This particular trip, that was impossible.

We are trying, with limited success, to limit her screen time, and if we are having dinner together at the table, either at home or at a restaurant, there's no screens. We'll bring toys, crayons, books, anything interactive that we can think of. We are both very busy, and she ends up in front of a screen far too often when we have something we need to do. We're not going to let her spend what little time we do have to spend with her in front of a screen.

Think you can just remove the tablet? Think again! They're
everywhere, and they're staring at you.

This seems like a pretty reasonable policy, we think. Normally, it is relatively simple to enforce, but it becomes more difficult when we walk into a restaurant and there is a bright, shiny, idiot box on every table, facing us as we walk in.

We tried to be clever and stash the tablet before she saw it as we were sitting down, but we were thwarted. Every other table has a table as well, including the kids at the table behind us who were playing with it.

So, our dinner of uninspired, generic and overpriced corporate impressions of Latin and Asian inspired food was punctuated with a constant and unremitting litany of "They're playing games. I want to play games. Why can't I play games? It's not fair."

One might argue that, perhaps this is a problem for us, but for many kids, these devices are helpful to keep them busy when otherwise they'd be unmanageable. I disagree there as well. The table behind us has three kids and one tablet. Care to surmise what we heard before we left? That's right. "It's my turn! I want to play! Let me play!" The whining from the table where they were letting the kids play the games were as loud as they were at ours where we forbade it.

I mentioned it to the waitress, and she agreed that the tablets cause more problems than they solve, but corporate mandates it, so they have to do it.

So, to Applebee's Corporate out in Kansas City, Missouri, you have lost a customer for a long as these devices clutter the tables of your restaurants.

In the spirit of good cheer, I'll be eating somewhere else tomorrow.

Teenage Years as a Beta Test Period

In the last post, I discussed the idea of strategically educating a child to prepare for success. Let us now explore how this educational strategy can survive the challenges of adolescence. My mother referred to that the teenage years as the "alien period". When I was 14, she says, I was replaced with an angry, practically unintelligible alien, to be returned at 19 with a pleasant, well mannered young man.

That is a valid point, adolescence is a time of pulling away, exploration, and independence, but not necessarily a time of alienation. I believe, based on some research and considerable anecdotal experience, that the most severe adolescent conflicts are caused by the unexpected transition from obedient and respectful child to adventurous, curious, and independent teenager. Most of the conflicts center around the teen's attempts to assert her independence versus the parent's desire to keep the child close and safe.

This next paragraph is one of those that I may read years hence and either pat myself on the back for my prescience or laugh at my naivete...

My theory is that if the teen years are looked at a different way it can increase their educational value, prepare the teen for adulthood and preserve the parental bond better. Rather than seeing the teen years as a difficult extended childhood, view them as a beta test for adulthood. Increase independence and responsibility progressively. Like any other training process, allow the teen just slightly more responsibility than she is ready to handle, then provide support as she grows into the challenge.

Rather than use arbitrary punishments to teach lessons, use natural consequences. Grounding is an artificial construct which has no parallel in the adult world. It shifts the lesson from understanding what she might have done wrong in the real situation to a lesson in how to win against mom and dad. A grounded child does not sit in her room and contemplate what she did wrong; she sits in her room and contemplates her anger at the punishment and how she can avoid it in the future: an absolutely useless learning process.

I cannot protect her from this, but
I can provide the mental resources
for her to protect herself.

If the teen does not live under the immediate fear of parental punishment, it allows her to open her awareness the more distant, but much more real, set of real threats and dangers in the world. Traditionally, a teen who goes to a party and stays out too late is most worried about the most proximate danger: mom and dad finding out. In reality, the real dangers are much more serious: alcohol poisoning, drunk driving, drug complications, personal injury, rape, etc. How many teens have died in drunk driving accidents because they did not want mom and dad to know where they were? How safe did that discipline structure keep that child?

Alternately, what if a teen of 16 is given the autonomy to make her own choices, under the condition that parents must be kept informed of where she is and what she is doing, not because they do not trust her but because adolescence is a form of training mode where the parents are available as referees, lifeguards, and coaches on call to assist when she gets in over her head but allowing her to have the experiences that will prepare her for the rest of her life.

Barney Stinson approves
of a restrictive parenting
style. I believe my point is made.

To those who think that I suggesting too permissive of a parenting style, I will give one more piece of evidence to support my theory. Ask a typical college boy how he feels when he meets a college girl who tells him that her parents were very restrictive and kept her safe at home, not letting her go out much. The word "JACKPOT" comes to mind, because he knows that she is ready to make up for all that she thinks that she missed out on, and mom and dad are no where in sight.

If the Koalid decides to party hard in college, I want it to be because she knows the risks and has weighed them against the rewards, not because she is trying to make up for lost time, and I want to be sure that she knows and understands that if she gets in over her head, even in college, her old dad and mom are still there for her.

Raising a Child Like You Make an RPG Character

When you are playing a tabletop role playing game, the first thing you do is make, or stat out, your character. This generally involves selecting skills, talent, and equipment for your character, which you choose based on the challenges that you anticipate the character will face.

Traveller, a system renouned
for its highly involved
and customizable character
creation system.

The natural reaction to a title such as this is that an RPG is a game and raising a child is serious. You can't think like you would in a game for real life! Really? What is a game, but a simulation for real life? Chess was most likely invented and was commonly used to give children an understanding of strategy, necessary risk, and tradeoffs.

Most parents do their best to make sure their children are ready for the world. They teach them manners, boost their self esteem, push them to do well in school, but too often they fail. Many children are growing up to find themselves in the adult world completely unprepared for the challenges that they face. Many cannot balance a checkbook, read a bus schedule, or go to a job interview without embarrassing themselves.

If we assume that most parents are fairly well educated people who are doing their best to prepare their children, how do their children end up so ill-prepared. I would suggest it is a lack of strategic thinking, born of thinking that their job is to provide encouragement and support while the school system will provide the hard skills that the child will need in the world. Moreover, if a parent does try to set their own curriculum of things that they think their child should know, they could be seen as "overprograming" or "stifling creativity." This is partly because school makes learning so unpleasant that a child doesn't want to come home and do more things they don't want to do.

I intend to approach this differently. Looking back on my life, I can see skills and knowledge that I learned later in my 20s, which I would have been much better off to have received earlier. Using this experience of my own and my best projections of what a child coming of age in 2032 will need to succeed, I will prepare the Koalid with a variety of skills.

When statting out an RPG character, one usually selects a good mix of basic skills so the character can do well on her own with a few specializations to give the character unique value to the party. The strategy here is similar. She will be taught a variety of basic skills: math, financial literacy, balancing a checkbook and managing a bank account, cooking, cleaning, manners for polite society, proper carriage, situational awareness, basic self defense technique, persuasive skills, etc.

The more specific skills would be based on her interests, but whatever those interests are, there are common things that can be taught to develop those interests. For example, selecting a project, planning it, and following through. If she takes and interest in flower arranging, then she will be encouraged to learn about all kinds of flowers, gardening and other related skills, then put those skills to practice by actually making arrangements. No matter what the subject she pursues, learning to follow start and follow through a major project will give her confidence that she can succeed and help her to understand what working for a goal really means.

Whether she decides to be a flower arranger or a bounty hunter,
the Koalid will be equipped with the skills and worldview
to allow her to be successful.

 My goal is that in August of 2032, when the Koalid is ready to go out into the world, she will be prepared for success. Whatever she decides to do, she will have a suite of basic skills to stay safe, assess and handle challenges, make a plan and execute it to success, all with ethics and moral integrity. This means adopting a mindset more of trainer and coach than protector. It does not one bit of good to keep her safe from the world until she is 18 if I then dump her out into it completely unprepared. While others her age are still trying to figure out what a work ethic is and wondering why they have already ruined their credit, she will be able to pursue whatever goals she seeks to follow.

But Michael, you might object, in this kind of strategy, the four years before she goes into the world would be the most vital in preparing her, but that's adolescence, the time when a child pulls away from a parent!

I'll address that extremely valid point in Thursday's Koalid post.

When All You Have is a Hammer, All the World's a Nail

Inappropriate for taking care of babies!

First, let me make clear that the title of this post is an expression. Neither hammers nor nails should be used in the proper care of a baby.

This blog for the next four months is, of course, entirely speculative. The following years of writing will be looking back at the first few months saying, "woah, why did I ever think that?" Your entertainment, dear reader, is that as you read each post, you can places your bets on which posts will get the "Woah? What?" treatment in years to come!


Humans have the remarkable ability to synthesize knowledge of the familiar to prepare for and respond to the new and unfamiliar. So, as I approach the coming challenge of raising a child, I draw upon my extensive knowledge of sales and management techniques. The knee jerk answer to that is "a child is neither an employee nor a prospect, and the same principles that apply to them cannot possibly apply to a child."

The core principles of business which I follow are fundamentally about understanding a person and what they want. It is about understanding their needs and desires, especially those that they are are unwilling or unable to express, and finding a way to fulfill those desires in a way that is mutually beneficial. That sounds to me like child raising... if it were explained by an emotionless robot.

In the research I am doing in preparation, I am reading a book called The New Father: A Dad's Guide to the First Year, by Armin Brott. Brott explains that a baby wants to communicate. She wants specific things, and she wants to let you know what those things are. It is simply up to the parent to be open to those signals. Of course, those signals will not be as clear as "please get me a bottle because I am hungry." It will be more like "wah, wah, waaaah," but hopefully with some sort of gesture of pitch that might differentiate it. In sales it's not always clearer. When I sold cars, sometimes the best indication I had of what a customer wanted a guttural grunting sound when we approached and SUV or a hatchback, or a subtle grimace at the thought of a red car.

In sales, there is a concept of WIIFM: What's In It For Me which I speak of often in my other blog, People I Meet. Most people go through life only thinking about what they want, and not what the people they encounter want. The salesman who wants to make a sale but does not consider why the customer would want to buy. The panhandler who wants people to give her money but does not consider why they would want to. The parent who wants the baby to stop crying but does not think about what the baby wants.

Too often, people blame the other person for their lack of success. The salesman who is not making sales will blame these stupid customers who don't want the product. They can blame the customer all they want, but it won't make one more sale. The only thing the salesman can control is the salesman, so the only useful line of thinking is "What can I do to get the result I want? What does the customer want and how can I provide that?"

Likewise, some parents with a child that is crying will blame the baby. "What's wrong with this kid, he cries all the time!" That is not useful thinking. The only thing the parent can control is the parent, so the only useful line of thinking is "What can I do to get the result I want? What does the baby want and how can I provide that?"

Sure, sounds easy enough, but what if nothing seems to work. This happens in sales too. Sometimes the
customer will just say no while giving no objections. Obviously there is a reason why he is saying no, but he's not going to tell you. This is where being a professional comes in. Knowing the possible objections allows the salesman to answer all the possible objections even without input:
"I understand that you are a bit hesitant, but we do have a less expensive model if that interests you."
"No."

This could apply to either scenario that I describe.

"The vehicle is available in a number of different colors and styles."
"No."
"There is another trim level that gets better gas mileage."
"No."
"You can get a back up camera, heated seats and bluetooth in this car."
"Oh, why didn't you say so."

Likewise, a baby might be similar.
"Do you want you bottle?"
"Waaahh."
"Is your diaper dirty?"
"Waaahh."
"Do you want to be cuddled?"
"Waaahh."
"Do you want to your binky?"
"Cooooo."

Most of the customers I have worked with, I have had a great personal respect for, and I have done my best to understand where they are coming for. Some, however, have sounded a great deal like crying babies. Now, to reverse the process and hear a crying baby as a person with unexpressed needs that I will use my skills and experience to satisfy.