Rediscovering parenting tools

One of my all-time favorite parenting books

Growing up, vacuuming was a real chore. Our industrial-strength canister vacuum looked like R2D2 minus the cool lights and funny voice, and hauling that clunky thing around was as much work as the vacuuming itself. We’d bang it against walls and furniture just moving from room to room, and going up and down stairs was out of the question. Dust mopping, in comparison, was efficient. Four times as wide as any broom we had in the house, our dust mop with its nifty little swivel device in the center made it easy to turn at the end of every pass across our hardwood floors. Good tools just make life easier.

Recently a friend reminded me of some parenting tools that once made my life easier, but I’d forgotten to use them. Jenny Doying, a licensed family and marriage counselor, taught a room full of us how to get along better with our children while helping them feel great about themselves. Drawing heavily on concepts from the book How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk (Faber and Mazlish), Jenny emphasized that so much of good parenting lies in good listening.

Her class triggered a memory of one of the most embarrassing periods of my life. We’d had our third child and, officially outnumbered, Ken and I were asked to teach an 8-week parenting course. Week after week, we would leave our two active toddlers and one screaming baby with the babysitter so we could go teach others how to raise their kids. To our students, it must have been painfully obvious we were no parenting experts; in fact, looking back, I’m quite sure we received this assignment to protect our own children from egregious parenting errors rather than to save other families. I do, however, wish I could remember more of what we taught because the curriculum was replete with good ideas (many of which came from the above-mentioned book). One of those, Jenny reminded me, was a tool that at one time I actually did implement effectively: “Say it with a word.” That’s right. One word.

Our children had a bad habit of leaving their wet towels on the floor after bath time. Hoping to correct their behavior, I would often go into a rant, stringing many words together. So, the concept of using only one word was foreign to me. Although I could never quite limit myself to just one word, I did manage to replace my tirade with a cheery three-word chant. “Wet towel alert!” I’d chirp. And guess what? Tension was diffused and those towels actually did go back up on the towel bar—like magic!

As a mother, I still have a tendency to use too many words and too few parenting tools. Without realizing it, before Jenny's class, I’d become a little lackadaisical about being an active listener and about choosing my words carefully. So, it’s time to stop knocking my way through conversations and dust off a few old tools.