Triple The Dad

Read enough parenting books and blogs and you'll inevitably come across this piece of advice: You shouldn't try to reason with toddlers.  They simply don't have the comprehension skills, emotion-management skills, expectation management skills or time-management skills to reason or rationalize. And surely, anyone who has watched as their kids melt down because someone cut their sandwich the wrong way, or because one parent or another pushed the elevator button first - the HORROR! - will realize that this is true. If only it were this easy... It is also advice I ignore.  Not entirely ignore, mind you, but largely ignore.  Because its a parenting TRAP and not entirely true.  Instead, I think you should totally talk to your kids above their cognition level.  What you should not  do is expect them to understand.  At least not right away. You see, I've found that if you talk to your kid like a baby or like the two-year-old child they are, the pass...

I talk to my kids a lot - a LOT - about taking deep breathes and the need to relax.  I do this mainly when they are frustrated with my wife and I or when one of the other kids take their toys or when, you know, the apple isn't perfectly apple-shaped.  But they also see me doing stretches and Yoga type stuff and taking deep breaths myself. But sometimes my emotions get the best of me.  I had one of those types of days this week.  One of the days where despite all my adultness, the pressures of life and child-rearing get the best of me.  And sometimes, my adult knowledge will lead me to see things in a different light than you see it.  Sometimes, I'm sad to say, kids, I'm going to fail. You will fall, as one of you did recently, for no obvious reasons in that funny way that you sometimes do.  It will be a short, soft fall and I'll know you are OK because I saw the fall.  All my training in falls and physics will tell me you are OK. I'll laug...

In one of the crazier traditions we apparently exported across the nation, Pennsylvanians predict how much longer winter will last by whether a groundhog sees his shadow on a specific day in February.  Its a big deal; the Washington Post covers it.  Amateurs in other states are now doing it, resulting in them having their ears bitten off. That groundhog saw his s hadow Monday, so I'm told we are in for a lot more winter.  Six more weeks of it, to be specific. We do this every year, and pretty much every year we get the same result: six more weeks of winter.  An editor I used to work with often pointed out that giant television and photography lights kind of pushes you toward one outcome over another.  I guess when you rely on a groundhog for your weather predictions, you aren't picky about such things. There is even a "culturally significant" film starring Bill Murray based around it.  In the movie, Murray's character repeats the...