Alan Fox

Daveen and I recently enjoyed brunch with one of our daughters and her husband. For whatever reason he and I started talking about raising children.

To my delight, we agreed on two very important aspects of parenting.

I said that my father did a pretty good job, with two exceptions.

The first was spanking. Dad spanked my brother and me as a punishment. (Fortunately, I was never on his “go to bed without dinner list.”  That was reserved for my younger brother, who was, shall we say, less strategic than I was.). While researchers have now made the case against using any kind of physical discipline against kids, some still use it.

Second was Dad’s insistence that I “finish everything on my plate,” even if I didn’t put it there.  I was told repeatedly about all the starving children in China. If I had thought of it at the time, I would have asked him exactly how the remnant of my dinner would be transported to China, but a snarky comment like that would probably have resulted in being sent to bed without my own dinner the following night.

When I was ten years old I made two promises to myself.

First, that I would never hit another person, and I haven’t.

I also vowed that I would never require my children to finish everything on their plate. I’m not blaming my dad, because I’m sure he didn’t know better, but forcing kids to eat teaches them to ignore their own hunger cues and can result in overeating. That might have been one reason I weighed more than two hundred pounds when I graduated high school. (My weight was 207, as I recall, eventually ballooning to 267 pounds.)

Raising children is a privilege, but one that we are seldom trained for. Most of us simply do to our children what our parents did to us.

I’m suggesting that we all rethink our habits, and retain those that are both useful and kind, especially with our greatest treasure — our children.

Spare the rod?

Absolutely.

Alan

Daveen and I have finally picked a date to go to a tailor to have some new shirts made for me. It seems that I’m running out. Yup, down to my last eighteen shirts!

The need to have an extra supply of something kind of runs in my family.  My mother had extremely narrow feet. So, when she found shoes that fit – she would buy every available pair. I like my shirts a certain way and insist that they have two pockets. Those are almost never available ready-made in stores. So off to the tailor we go.

But why the need to have so many? Years ago, we visited a rice paddy in Bali and met the people working there.

We were generously invited into the three-room home of one of the farmers. I was struck by the sight of a single white shirt resting on a table.

“For tomorrow,” he said.

I asked where he kept his other clothes.

“For tomorrow,” he repeated, as if that would help me understand. And eventually I did.

That was his only other shirt – the one he would wear tomorrow. I couldn’t help but make a comparison between my life of many shirts, and his life of only two.

Perhaps I’m better off. But sometimes I wonder…

Alan

I’ve recently completed reading the series of books about Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro.  Born and raised in the hill country of West Texas, Lyndon Johnson went on to become President of the United States.  But when he was a boy, if his family needed hot water, someone had to take a bucket down to the nearby river, carry the water back to the house, go back out to chop some wood, bring that back to the house, load the wood into the woodstove, light it on fire, then wait for the water to heat. Sounds like a major expenditure of time and effort.

In other words, it used to be a lot of work to take a bath.

What do most people in the United States do today?  Simply turn the spigot and adjust the temperature.  Viola!

By introducing greater efficiency (thanks to engineering and technology and the miracle of modern plumbing) we minimize our personal effort and enjoy the benefits of hot water without even thinking about it.

Most of us reject unnecessary effort. On a trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco we do not customarily add a detour to Detroit. We value the use of our time and energy, because both are limited.

Greater efficiency offers the possibility of a greater return on our time and effort. That’s why, for example, the Federal Government has mandated increasing gas mileage for automobiles. They simply want to squeeze the greatest return from the investment in fuel. And perhaps that will have the added benefit of reducing greenhouse gases.

Now, we find ourselves at a particularly interesting juncture in our civilization. With the development of AI, there are opportunities to streamline many of the “executive” and creative tasks typically carried out by humans. Such as writing a blog. But at what cost? What happens when efficiency overrides creativity and the human touch? What happens when we don’t have to “think” anymore to solve problems because a computer will do it for us. Maybe, as with the gathering of water from the river, we’ll be able to use that time to do something more creative and be even more productive. I hope so.

But in the interest of being efficient myself, I think I’ve made the point, and see no value in my saying more about that subject at this time. I assure you, this blog was written entirely by a human.

Alan