Sh***y Parents Anonymous

So I about fell out of my chair laughing at Drew Magary’s post over at Deadspin. He accounts attending his first class of the Parent Encouragement Program, which he called Sh***y Parents Anonymous. The advice he recounts is mostly right on, following the Democratic Parenting style of including your kids in the decisions that affect their lives. What got me was his humor, especially when he makes fun of himself. I’ll warn you now, his humor is crude and full of swear words, as if you couldn’t tell from this post’s title. That said, parenting has to be fun because you have to do so much of it, and Magary made me laugh.

Of the various items in Magary’s list, the two I tackle the most with parents are avoiding power struggles and controlling yourself since that is the only person you can control.

Please avoid power struggles. If you are struggling for power with a kid when you own the house, you buy the groceries, you control the car, you pay the phone bill and you provide the allowance, then you have brought your child up to your pay grade, or more likely, you have demoted yourself. The best way to avoid a power struggle–control yourself.

Which parent sounds more in control to you?

  • You can’t have any dessert until you finish your dinner!
  • I provide dinner to children who finish their dinner.

Have a friend throw a couple of “You can’t,” “You must,” “Don’t you ever”‘s your way and see if it doesn’t just pull you into saying something sassy back. Hearing a “You…” is hearing someone tell you what to do. Most of us do not like to be told what to do and we push back. Kids are supposed to grow more independent–it is their job–, and so they are primed to let you have it if you start telling, even demanding, that they do something. That is were the magic is in the second example.

When you say what you are going to do, you are controlling yourself and yourself only. You have provided little invitation to argue, though there might be one to whine. You may provide the same type of answer, such as, “I am only able to hear requests for dessert when asked in a big girl voice.”

So here is the link to the SPA post: 9 Things I learned in the Parent Encounter Program.

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How to Change Facebook Notification Settings

One of my favorite techie sites, Lifehacker, made a short video showing how to update your Facebook notification settings. Use these settings to limit the torrent of email you receive from your Facebook friends. Link to video.

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My return to blogging

I haven’t posted to my blog in a while. My time went mostly to the move. This is my second short move in my life, this time I moved only across the hallway. Last time, in my graduate school days, I moved across the street from one apartment to another. Neither move was easy, even though I thought lugging my stuff across such short distances would actually make it easier. Not so, it only fooled me into thinking it would be easier.

So the new address is 1600 S. Main St., Suite 225, Walnut Creek CA  94596. Only the suite number has changed.

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Facebook trains you to divulge

Facebook, “…lavishes you with attention from the people that you love the more you disclose about your life,” says Cory Doctorow in a Ted talk.The disconnect between disclosure and negative consequences (in time or because you never find out) frustrates adults trying to warn kids about the dangers of saying too much on Facebook or any other internet application. (It makes it hard to caution about the dangers of smoking and poor diet too.)

Like me, Cory is unimpressed with the available monitoring programs for watching your children. We both believe they don’t work that well; it is too easy for kids to get around. He goes in another direction as well; it teaches kids that surveillance by authority figures is okay. In fact, he goes on, any of the tools that we would like our kids to have in order to protect themselves (encryption, proxy servers, cleaning out cookies) defeats not only those who want to steal our childrens’ information, it also defeats the parental monitoring and control programs.

As a start, he would like us to promote privacy and educate our children so that the default question is, “Why do you need to know that?”

via BoingBoing

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So You Want to Be a Clinical Psychologist

Yes, psychologists can make fun of ourselves. This video is a hilarious take on a undergraduate student explaining why she wants to pursue a Ph.D in clinical psychology. Some of the satire is so right on that it hurt to watch it, and it hurts to share this with you. But it is also funny, and that is enough.

Yes, I am still paying off student loans, and business expense eat into my take-home pay. Very few people call me doctor, and even when they do, I say it is okay to just call me Marc. Clinical psychology is about empathy, understanding and relationship; it is not about social standing.

And I suppose, truth be told, that the video is making fun of psychologists. My sharing it with you is psychologists laughing at ourselves.

Please let me know what you think in the comments.

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Children Believe their Lying Parents

Tell a three-year-old child that a prize is under the red cup, when he saw you put it under the yellow cup, and he will believe you and look under the red cup. Researchers from University of Virginia in Charlottesville studied how children react when they know their parents are not telling the truth. The kids believe their parents when the parents speak a lie, but they did not believe their parents when their mom or dad merely pointed to the wrong cup.

This makes complete sense to me. I remember, as a young boy, needing to get the wax washed out of one of my ears. The nurse, being silly, I am now sure, told me to plug my other ear so that the water would run out the far side of my head. I knew she was lying. I knew my ears do not connect across the inside of my head. I looked to my mom, who gave no hint at what I should do. I gave an internal shrug, told myself that she was a nurse, that this was an important medical procedure, that I was wrong to have wax in my ears and to cost our family money to get it fixed, and that I ought to follow instructions. I complied; I stuck my finger in my other ear, and got laughed at for my troubles. All these years later, my obedience still bugs me, I feel silly and stupid. And yet I understand why I did as I was told.

Now, before I (and you, dear reader) believe smugly that we, as adults, would never fall for this; that we would believe our own eyes before ever trusting an authority figure, remember Soloman Asch’s experiments about social conformity from the 1950′s (link). You, as the subject in the experiment, and a bunch of other “subjects” (really confederates to the researcher) would be shown three lines of different length. The the researcher would ask the confederates first what line was longest, for example. The confederates would all give the same wrong answer. Thirty percent of subjects would go along with any one wrong answer, and seventy-five percent of the subjects agreed with at least one wrong answer.

If adults will agree with strangers, of course three-year-olds will agree with their parents. And of course I believed the nurse. Now, think of the bravery of the one juror who would not convict Rod Blagojevich, the ex-governor of Illinois accused of plotting to sell Barack Obama’s senate seat. Think of the courage that juror must have had (NPR report). That person must have known that the whole nation thought he was guilty. And she refused to go along. She stood by her convictions. She did not submit.

Studies on conformity were done in the 1950s in large part to answer the question of why so many regular, ordinary German citizens obeyed unlawful and unethical orders. Why did they become mass murderers? The research, and our human history, shows the bravery of people who stand up against wrongs, such as the Blagojevich juror, Martin Luther King, Jr., Susan B. Anthony, and many more. There is hope for us as a people to do the right thing, and knowing how easy it is for us to conform, despite the lies we tell ourselves about being an individual, will help us overcome our biases and our weaknesses.

Monitor on Psychology (link)

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Facebook Gets HTTPSecure

Facebook is giving users the options to connect to its servers using HTTPS (the S stands for secure). This is a new feature, you must change your account settings for this to work; Facebook is not making it automatic. Also it is rolling out over the next few weeks, so your account may not have it yet. To set it, go to Account, choose Account Settings (not Privacy Settings). Then, under the Settings tab, select Account Settings, and then Secure Browsing (if your account has the new feature).

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New Guide to Securing Your Facebook Privacy

ZDNet, the parent company to PCMag and other computer related content, posted a four-part series on locking down the privacy settings on Facebook. The lead article, with links to each part can be found here. Remember that Facebook frequently changes its privacy setting, new features often compromise your settings, and most third-party apps (like Farmville) get to access your personal date, so check and recheck your privacy settings with some frequency.

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Grace, Resilient Kids and a System

A mother at one of my recent talks told me afterward that the most helpful thing I said was, “If you make a mistake in parenting, your child will give you 400 more chances to get it right.” She was relieved by the grace our children offer us. Our kids let us practicing on them as we learn how to be parents. They suffer our mistakes. But they also forgive us, love us, and come back for more.

Like so many other mothers, she was so anxious to raise her kids correctly that she did not want to make any mistakes. And while we tell our kids, “There is no parenting manual,” there are many how-to guides that tell us how to raise our kids. In fact, there are too many of them, each one cataloging the mistakes of the bad-example parents, and show us how it should be done. Add to that our own high expectations of ourselves, and it is no wonder we don’t give ourselves any grace to learn on the job. We tell ourselves we must be perfect,

So, what to do? First, remember that your children are resilient. Second, I’d suggest picking a system that fits with your values and ways of parenting, and stick with it. The system will give you a platform from which to evaluate all of the other advice that comes your way. You won’t feel compelled to use every new technique. Plus, by following one system, you will learn its internal logic so that you can guide yourself through the situations not covered in the system you picked.

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The New Facebook Groups: A Privacy Risk

Facebook launched a new feature called Groups. On its face, it offers a way to limit who you share information with. In an interview posted on Cnet, Mark Zukerberg said,

There are a lot of things you want to share with all your friends at once, but there are also things that you only want to share with your family or some co-workers. If you don’t have a way to do that, you just won’t share them at all.

So, to promote sharing, his company lets users set up a group to limit who you share with to a subset of friends. However, as that Cnet article warns, the friends you add to the group can add their friends as well. Say, for example, that you want to make a group for your cheer-leading squad. Well, one person on the squad can add a friend of hers, and that newly added person can add her friends too. Soon, you are sharing with so many more people than you imagined you would be, many of whom are not on the cheer-leading squad. Something that was meant to increase privacy and allow finer-tuned sharing ends up being just the opposite–it is too easy to over share.

Further, any friend can sign you up for a group. Imagine if someone adds you to a group you detest. What if an avowed Anarchist is added to the Republican National Convention group? TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, reports PC World, added Mark Zukerberg to the group North American Man/Boy Love Association, which promotes sex between adult men and under-aged boys. Being added to a group without your permission decreases your control over how you present yourself to the Facebook community. While we as citizens have the right to assemble, we ought also to have the right to no join groups when we don’t want to join.  Note, though, that after being added to a group, you can remove yourself. This is, however, after the fact of being added in the first place.

Once again, Facebook has damaged the trust its users put into it.

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